Senior Applied Data Scientist - Ad Bidding ML Role in Columbus
Career & Market Insight
High-Impact, Niche Specialization — This role sits at the intersection of applied ML and performance marketing — a rare and highly compensated niche. Data scientists who can directly drive ROAS and paid media bidding decisions command significant market premiums. Senior applied DS roles in ad tech typically range from $150K–$220K USD annually in the US market; without stated salary, it's worth negotiating aggressively.
Skills you'll build and deepen:
- Delayed-label and feedback-loop modeling — among the hardest real-world ML problems
- Auction theory and selection bias handling in live bidding environments
- Full end-to-end ML ownership: data sourcing → feature engineering → deployment → monitoring
- AWS ML stack (SageMaker, Athena, ECS, S3) — high-demand cloud ML skills
Green flags: Bootstrapped and profitable (no VC pressure to pivot), outcome-driven culture, clear 60-day and 1-year success milestones, and ML engineer support on production. You won't be a lone wolf.
Watch for: The scope is narrow initially (auto insurance only), and this is an IC role with no mention of a team to lead — career growth may be lateral rather than managerial. The "change is constant" framing could signal shifting priorities. Ensure the vertical expansion timeline is realistic before joining.
Overall, this is a strong career move for a senior DS professional wanting depth in performance marketing ML, ownership, and a profitable, stable company environment.
WHO ARE WE?
Launch Potato is the discovery and conversion company. We reach tens of millions of people every month through our brands, including FinanceBuzz, All About Cookies, and OnlyInYourState. We turn that attention into real outcomes for our partners, some of the world's leading companies.
Our mission: create predictable, high-value customer acquisition at scale by connecting discovery, intent, and performance across category-leading consumer brands in finance, travel, and entertainment.
We run profitable and bootstrapped, with a South Florida HQ and a remote-first team across 18 countries.
WHY JOIN US?
You own outcomes here, not tasks. We measure work by impact, not activity. The pace is real, and change is constant — the people who do best turn change into opportunity instead of waiting for it to settle. Feedback runs direct and lands with respect. Ordinary people make themselves extraordinary at Launch Potato.
YOUR ROLE
You'll build the models that decide which carrier each auto insurance shopper sees on our click wall. The goal is to send every user to the carrier most likely to convert them, so carriers see our traffic convert and raise their bids. You'll also own the buying models behind our media spend, which are held to ROAS.
Carrier conversion data (quotes, policies, and acquisition cost) is now coming back to us, and you'll be the one who puts it to work in production. The hard part is the data. Outcomes land weeks or months after the click, many sessions are sparse, the same shoppers come back, and the market drifts. Our bids also decide which users we win, so the model shapes the data it learns from next.
This is a hands-on individual contributor role. You frame problems directly with the business, find your own data, build and validate the model, and stay with it through deployment and monitoring. An ML engineer works alongside you on the production side. Auto insurance takes most of your time to start, and scope broadens to other verticals over time.
We're remote-first, and most of the company works East Coast hours.
WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE
By day 60, you run our insurance marketplace media buying on your own.
By the end of your first year:
- Click wall serving that matches each user to the right carrier
- Carrier conversion data running in production models
- Automated marketplace bidding taken from proof of concept to scale
- A clear approach for repeat users and sparse sessions
- Production models that hold up through drift and changing objectives
- Output the business trusts and uses without rework
MUST HAVE
- 5+ years of hands-on applied data science with measurable business impact
- Your models drove paid media decisions: spend, bidding, or ad serving. Attribution and reporting alone don't qualify.
- You built what's on your resume and can explain it down to the loss function and architecture choice, neural network fundamentals included
- You see how today's bids shape tomorrow's training data, and you've handled late labels, sparse features, or drift
- You own models end to end: you find your own data, build through deployment and monitoring, and bring a point of view
- Expert Python and SQL
NICE TO HAVES
- Real ad budget spent in live auctions
- Large-scale ranking or recommendation systems
- Explaining tradeoffs to non-technical partners in plain terms
- Designing for auction feedback loops, selection bias, and exploration
- Hands-on neural network work, such as embeddings of text, creative, or user behavior
- AWS for data science: ECS, S3, Athena, SageMaker
- CI/CD deployment
Want to accelerate your career? Apply now!
Since day one, we've been committed to having a diverse, inclusive team and culture. We are proud to be an Equal Employment Opportunity company. We value diversity, equity, and inclusion.
We do not discriminate based on race, religion, color, national origin, gender (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, status as a protected veteran, status as an individual with a disability, or other applicable legally protected characteristics.
Frequently Asked Questions
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