{"id":1123593,"url":"https://alion.io/job/viant-director-applied-science-ad-optimization-ml-systems","title":"Director, Applied Science - Ad Optimization & ML Systems","company":{"id":685548,"name":"Viant","domain":"viantinc.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/viantinc","size_band":null,"is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Greenhouse","truth_index":{"grade":"A","score":85,"open_postings":24,"ghost_share":0.167,"stale_share":0,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":64,"computed_at":"2026-11-09T06:03:00Z"}},"role":"Leadership","role_family":"Leadership","seniority":"head","employment_type":null,"work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Irvine, United States","San Francisco, United States","Los Angeles, United States","Seattle, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":225000,"max":275000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":275000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":10,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Machine Learning","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2025-10-16T16:22:23Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-10-13","last_verified_at":"2026-11-09T06:45:05Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":388,"trust":{"level":"ghost","repost_count":0,"flags":["stale","company_stale"],"days_open":388},"description":"WHAT YOU'LL DO\nThe Machine Learning team at Viant builds the real-time decisioning systems that power programmatic advertising - models that predict, in milliseconds, whether an ad opportunity is worth bidding on, and systems that decide how much to bid, live, across billions of auctions.\nWe're looking for an experienced Director of Applied Science to own this technical domain end to end: the models, the production systems they run on, and the team that builds them. This is a hands-on, player-coach role - you'll review designs, unblock scientists on hard formulation problems, and still be able to work through the math and the system tradeoffs yourself when it matters.\nTHE DAY-TO-DAY\nOwn the end-to-end design, deployment, and performance of Viant's real-time prediction and bid-optimization systems - models that run inside strict latency budgets and directly drive auction outcomes\nDefine the technical formulation for ambiguous ad-optimization problems: what's being optimized (click, conversion, ROAS, or incremental value), who the valid training population is, what the model should predict, and how a downstream system should interpret it\nProvide technical and strategic leadership to a team of applied scientists and ML engineers - reviewing designs, coaching through production tradeoffs, and setting technical direction\nOwn the operational realities of production ML at scale: delayed feedback and attribution, label imbalance, latency and serving constraints, monitoring, drift, and retraining\nEvaluate and improve the systems that decide how bids are placed and adjusted in live auctions, incorporating budget, volume, and business constraints into the model's output\nCollaborate with Product and Engineering leadership to align technical roadmap with business priorities\nBuild toward more autonomous, multi-step decisioning systems as the team's technical roadmap expands beyond single-prediction models\nMUST HAVE\n10+ years of experience building and deploying production machine learning systems, with at least 5+ years in a hands-on technical leadership role\nDirect experience with real-time, high-scale decisioning systems - ad optimization, bidding, ranking, recommendation, or a closely comparable domain with similar latency and volume constraints\nDemonstrated ability to formulate an ambiguous business problem into a precise ML specification: labels, training population, objective, loss function, and evaluation metrics - without relying on framework-level generalities\nWorking fluency in the operational demands of production ML: delayed feedback, latency and serving tradeoffs, monitoring, drift, and retraining\nA track record of technical leadership: reviewing and improving other scientists' system designs, not just managing their output\nBachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field; Master's preferred\nGREAT TO HAVE\nDirect experience with real-time bidding, ad auctions, or programmatic advertising systems specifically\nExperience with identity resolution or cross-device/cross-platform user matching\nExperience with agentic or multi-step autonomous decisioning systems\nPhD in Machine Learning, Computer Science, or a related field\nPublications or conference contributions in ML or a closely related field\nFormal people-management tenure beyond the 5-year hands-on leadership requirement above\nLIFE AT VIANT\nInvesting in our employee’s professional growth is important to us, but so is investing in their well-being. That’s why Viant was voted one of the best places to work and some of our favorite employee benefits includefully paid health insurance, paid parental leave and unlimited PTO and more. \nBase compensation range: $225,000 - $275,000\nIn accordance with California law, the range provided is Viant’s reasonable estimate of the compensation for this role. Final title and compensation for the position will be based on several factors including work experience and education.\nAbout Viant\nViant Technology (NASDAQ: DSP) is an exclusively buy-side, AI-powered advertising platform purpose-built for CTV. Viant uniquely combines proprietary content intelligence, household-level identity resolution, and person-level attention signals to connect advertisers with real customers and drive measurable outcomes across the open internet. Through its award-winning AI solutions, Viant is building the future of autonomous advertising, where AI doesn't just assist the campaign, it delivers real results. Learn more at viantinc.com.\nViant is an equal opportunity employer and makes employment decisions on the basis of merit. Viant prohibits unlawful discrimination against employees or applicants based on race (including traits historically associated with race, such as hair texture and protective hairstyles), religion, religious creed, color, national origin, ancestry, physical disability, mental disability, medical condition, genetic information, marital status, sex, reproductive health decision making, gender, gender identity, gender expression, age, military status, veteran status, uniformed service member status, sexual orientation, transgender identity, citizenship status, pregnancy, or any other consideration made unlawful by federal, state, or local laws. Viant also prohibits unlawful discrimination based on the perception that anyone has any of those characteristics, or is associated with a person who has or is perceived as having any of those characteristics.\nBy clicking “Apply for this Job” and providing any information, I accept the Viant California Personnel Privacy Notice.","description_format":"text","description_chars":5570,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":10,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":{"level":"bachelor","optional":false},"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Health insurance","Parental leave","Unlimited PTO"],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Artificial Intelligence","Advertising","Marketing & Sales AI"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-22T20:08:09Z"}],"visa":[{"country":"US","licensed_sponsor":true,"adverts_offering_sponsorship_24m":0,"sanctioned_now":false,"evidence":"H-1B filings in 12 months: 25 · green card filings: 3","filings_12m":25,"filings_prev_12m":13,"green_card_filings_12m":3,"median_offered_wage_usd":181964,"route":null,"cap_exempt":false,"checked_at":"2026-11-09T07:32:21+00:00","sources":["US Department of Labor: LCA disclosure data (H-1B, H-1B1, E-3)","US Department of Labor: PERM disclosure data (green cards)"],"filings_for_role_12m":0}],"liveness":{"score":8,"band":"cold","label":"Long shot","p_open":1,"p_active":0.3,"p_room":0.28,"age_days":388,"expected_fill_days":64,"reasons":["conf:3","ghost","win:tail","crowd:"],"computed_at":"2026-11-09T06:03:00Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":275000,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/viant-director-applied-science-ad-optimization-ml-systems","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/viant-director-applied-science-ad-optimization-ml-systems.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-11-09T10:00:09Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":10160,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-11-10T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.1,"usd":0.01,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":685548},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=685548"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fviant-director-applied-science-ad-optimization-ml-systems"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":2,"usd":0.2},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fviant-director-applied-science-ad-optimization-ml-systems"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.1,"usd":0.01},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fviant-director-applied-science-ad-optimization-ml-systems"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/viant-director-applied-science-ad-optimization-ml-systems\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fviant-director-applied-science-ad-optimization-ml-systems"}],"agent":{"mcp":"https://alion.io/mcp/jobs","mcp_open":"https://alion.io/mcp/open","next":[{"tool":"get_job","arguments":{"id":1123593}},{"tool":"search_jobs","arguments":{"company":"viantinc.com","detail":"compact"}},{"tool":"match_people","arguments":{"job_id":1123593},"note":"people open to offers who fit this vacancy"}],"note":"The same data through MCP tools: https://alion.io/mcp/open needs no sign-in (compact searches, postings, people); https://alion.io/mcp with an Alion account has everything. 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