Senior Applied Scientist II, Ads Optimization

The role involves leading the algorithmic direction of Instacart's advertising systems, focusing on bid optimization, pacing, and budgeting to maximize advertiser value while balancing user experience and platform revenue. It requires expertise in control theory, optimization, and auction economics.

Location: Remote (US)

Salary: $201,000—$253,500 USD

Responsibilities

• Design and evolve real-time bid optimization systems that translate advertiser goals into optimal auction bids under uncertainty.
• Build intelligent budget pacing algorithms that distribute spend across time and auction opportunities.
• Develop the analytical frameworks that connect bidding, pacing, and budgeting into a coherent optimization objective.
• Shape auction mechanics including reserve pricing, multi-slot allocation, and bid-to-price mapping.
• Own the full research-to-production loop: diagnose system behavior from large-scale data, formulate hypotheses, design experiments, ship production code, and measure impact.

Requirements

• MS or PhD in operations research, applied mathematics, control systems, computational economics, or a related quantitative field.
• 8+ years of experience building and deploying optimization or control systems in production environments.
• Strong foundation in at least two of: feedback control theory (PID, MPC), convex and stochastic optimization, auction theory and mechanism design, dynamic programming.
• Proficiency in one of the following languages: Go, Java, C++ for production systems and Python for data analysis and offline pipelines.
• Demonstrated ability to translate mathematical formulations into production code that runs at scale (millions of decisions per day, sub-100ms latency constraints).

Benefits

• Highly market-competitive compensation and benefits.
• Eligible for a new hire equity grant and annual refresh grants.
• Remote work policy with location-dependent pay ranges.