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About the Role

Applied scientists at TTD work closely with engineering throughout the product lifecycle, from ideation to production and monitoring. In this AI Lab role, you will focus on designing and developing agentic AI applications and systems, such as The Trade Desk's AI Assistant. You will own a technical area end-to-end, from evaluation through production, while also raising the bar for the scientists and engineers around you.

Responsibilities

Drive the evaluation platform for the AI Assistant, including benchmark generation, human and AI-judge scoring, and scenario-driven testing aligned with human feedback.
Drive prompt and harness optimization, including automatic tuning and research, and own the release gate that decides what ships to traders and buyers.
Build and maintain the guardrail and safety framework for input and output checks across all agents in the AI Assistant.
Set the evaluation, best practices and training standards that other teams adopt as agentic AI spreads across the business.
Mentor the scientists and engineers around you, and contribute to the applied science roadmap for AI Lab, identifying high-impact problems and coordinating with engineering, AI Infrastructure, and Omnichannel opportunities.

Requirements

Sustained track record of turning research into agent capabilities that ship.
Ability to think beyond the immediate task to understand why it matters.
Ability to scope a six-week delivery cycle, keep it moving, and know when shipping fast would compromise quality.
Strong sense of data and model intuition.
Ability to work from first principles to build evaluation, guardrails, and optimization that fit systems.
Product-focused and start-up mindset, enjoying moving quickly on innovative product ideas.
Ability to mentor by doing, guiding and teaching others.
Habit of guiding AI-assisted development, knowing the difference between blindly accepting model output, refusing to use it, and guiding it to the right answer.
An abundance of intellectual curiosity, and enthusiasm to learn and teach new techniques as agentic AI keeps changing.
Comfort working on an agile, distributed team spanning multiple time zones.
Ability to communicate clearly across technical and non-technical audiences.
5+ years of experience (or 3+ with a PhD) in a data-driven or applied ML role, including leading technical projects end-to-end.
Comfort writing production-quality, reviewable code.
Working with confidence and without ego.
Commitment to valuing, seeking out, and fostering diversity of background and perspective on your team.
Track record of turning recent agent or LLM research into solutions for real, messy problems, not just benchmarks.
Experience building evaluation harnesses, benchmark datasets, or scenario-driven testing for LLM-based systems.
Experience with routing, prompt optimization, or memory systems for agents operating at scale.
Hands-on experience with guardrail or safety systems for AI-facing products.
Experience with orchestration or workflow tooling such as Ray, Airflow, or Dagster for production data and training pipelines.

Skills

Python
Deep learning framework (e.g., PyTorch)
Supervised fine-tuning
Preference optimization (e.g., DPO)
Databricks
Spark
Delta Lake
Unity Catalog
SQL
MLflow
vLLM
Ray Serve
LangGraph
DSPy
MCP-based tooling
Llama Guard
NeMo Guardrails
Ray
Airflow
Dagster

Location

Global

Work Type

Full-time
Agile
Distributed

Experience Level

5+ years of experience (or 3+ with a PhD) in a data-driven or applied ML role, including leading technical projects end-to-end.

Education Level

Advanced degree in a quantitative field is useful but not required.

About the Company

The Trade Desk is a global technology company and the world’s leading independent platform for digital advertising, with nearly 4,000 employees across more than 30 offices.
Our technology helps advertisers reach the right audiences across the open internet — from streaming TV and podcasts to mobile apps, news, and more.
Advertising powers the content people love. By making it more transparent, effective, and responsible, we help support trusted journalism, quality entertainment, and creators worldwide.
The world’s brands and agencies rely on us to reach their customers and grow their businesses responsibly.
The scale of our platform brings unique technical challenges — from processing massive datasets in real time to building systems that operate reliably on a global scale.
When you work here, your impact is worldwide.
We welcome diverse perspectives, encourage curiosity, and build teams that learn from one another.
If you’re driven to solve meaningful challenges, we’d love to meet you.

Equal Opportunity

The Trade Desk does not accept unsolicited resumes from search firm recruiters. Fees will not be paid in the event a candidate submitted by a recruiter without an agreement in place is hired; such resumes will be deemed the sole property of The Trade Desk.
The Trade Desk is an equal opportunity employer.
All aspects of employment will be based on merit, competence, performance, and business needs.
We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, marital status, age, national origin, ancestry, physical or mental disability, medical condition, pregnancy, genetic information, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, veteran status, or any other status protected under federal, state, or local law.
As an Equal Opportunity Employer, The Trade Desk is committed to creating an inclusive hiring experience where everyone has the opportunity to thrive.
Please reach out to us at accommodations@thetradedesk.com to request an accommodation or discuss any accessibility needs you may require to access our Company Website or navigate any part of the hiring process.
When you contact us, please include your preferred contact details and specify the nature of your accommodation request or questions.
Any information you share will be handled confidentially and will not impact our hiring decisions.