Data Scientist - R&D Team - Taboola
Join Taboola, a leading performance-driven advertising company and a proud Great Place to Work® Certified employer. As a Data Scientist on our R&D Team in Downtown Los Angeles, you will leverage cutting-edge technology to work on recommendation and ranking algorithms that power Taboola’s performance advertising platform, Realize, serving over 600 million daily active users. You will also contribute to building agentic AI systems.
The models you develop will have a direct impact on campaign performance and revenue outcomes for advertisers globally.
About the Role
This role is focused on designing, building, and deploying sophisticated ML models for recommendation and ranking. You will take end-to-end ownership of ML systems, from design and development to deployment and maintenance, utilizing AI-assisted coding tools. A key aspect of this role involves building robust evaluation harnesses and test frameworks to ensure confident and repeatable model deployments.
Key Responsibilities
- Design and build predictive customer behavior models for targeting and personalization.
- Implement applicable Machine Learning or statistics-based algorithms for prediction and optimization, delivering trained models to production.
- Take end-to-end ownership: design, build, ship, measure, and maintain models and their surrounding services, rapidly prototyping and delivering complete projects using AI-assisted "vibe coding" workflows.
- Act as a Harness Engineer: build evaluation harnesses, automated testing frameworks, benchmarks, and guardrails to enable safe and repeatable experimentation and deployment of AI/ML systems, following a TDD process.
- Communicate technical findings clearly and actionably to product teams and technical leads.
- Build and maintain code to populate HDFS and Hadoop with logs from Kafka or data loaded from SQL production systems.
- Design, build, and support algorithms for data transformation, conversion, and computation on Hadoop, Spark, and other distributed Big Data Systems.
Requirements
To thrive in this role, you'll need:
- Master’s degree or Ph.D., ideally in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Physics, Computational Economics, or a similar field.
- 5+ years of hands-on experience in Python and Java.
- Proficiency with ML frameworks such as PyTorch, Tensorflow, and Spark MLlib.
- SQL proficiency for data exploration and analysis.
- A system-architecture mindset, with the ability to design scalable, reliable, high-performance systems and understand how models fit into the broader data and serving infrastructure.
- Experience with end-to-end ownership of ML systems: design, build, ship, measure, and maintain, using AI-assisted "vibe coding" tools (e.g., Cursor, Claude, GitHub Copilot).
- Experience building automated evaluation harnesses and test frameworks for ML systems, defining benchmarks, baselines, and guardrails for confident and repeatable shipping.
- Ability to communicate technical findings clearly and collaborate effectively across teams, including syncs with our Tel Aviv team (requiring early morning or evening availability).
Bonus Points
- Experience with recommendation systems, ranking algorithms, or personalization at scale.
- Familiarity with real-time ML and large-scale data mining.
Why Taboola?
Taboola empowers businesses to grow through performance advertising technology. We offer:
- Well-being: Comprehensive benefits (health, dental, vision, 401k matching), a fully stocked kitchen, and parking.
- Flexibility: A hybrid work schedule with 3 days in-office, with the option to come in more often.
- Impact: Work with major publisher partners like Yahoo, Conde Nast, Fox Sports, NBCU, ESPN, CBS, and E! Online, and advertiser clients such as Wells Fargo, Honda, Pinterest, and Expedia.
- Empowerment to realize your full potential and grow alongside talented colleagues.
Compensation & Perks
- Base Salary Pay Range: $138,500 - $188,000 USD.
- The pay offered may vary based on location, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience.
- Perks may include a discretionary bonus, equity, flexible PTO, medical/dental/vision insurance, competitive 401(k) match, paid parental leave, and more.
Note: Taboola is an equal opportunity employer. Learn more about #TaboolaLife on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, X, YouTube, & the Taboola Life Blog.