{"id":2941805,"url":"https://alion.io/job/viant-sr-applied-scientist","title":"Sr. Applied Scientist","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":"B","score":83,"open_postings":8,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.5,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":64,"computed_at":"2026-10-23T05:54:15Z"}},"role":"AI/ML","role_family":"AI/ML","seniority":"senior","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","Los Angeles, United States","Seattle, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":160000,"max":200000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":200000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":3,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"bandit","optional":false},{"name":"Machine Learning","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"PyTorch","optional":false},{"name":"Recommender Systems","optional":false},{"name":"Reinforcement Learning","optional":false},{"name":"Reinforcement Learning","optional":false},{"name":"TensorFlow","optional":false},{"name":"Multimodal AI","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-10-02T21:31:48Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-10-20","last_verified_at":"2026-10-24T03:48:04Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":21,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":21},"description":"WHAT YOU’LL DO\nViant’s Machine Learning team is building autonomous advertising systems that make real-time decisions across targeting, ad optimization, bidding, measurement, and personalization. These systems process hundreds of millions of events daily and operate in the high-throughput, low-latency environment of programmatic advertising.\nAs an Applied Scientist, you will apply reinforcement learning and related decision-making methods to improve how Viant selects, ranks, and bids on advertising opportunities. You will work across contextual bandits, exploration and exploitation, counterfactual learning, and model-based experimentation to turn research into production systems that improve campaign performance, auction efficiency, and measurable business outcomes.\nTHE DAY-TO-DAY\n Develop, train, and evaluate reinforcement learning, contextual bandit, ranking, and prediction models for ad optimization, bid optimization, targeting, and personalization.\nStudy auction dynamics, delayed feedback, exploration and exploitation, budget constraints, pacing, and reward design to improve real-time advertising decisions.\nTranslate research ideas into production-ready models that operate reliably at high throughput and low latency across Viant’s advertising platform.\nDesign and analyze offline and online experiments, including counterfactual and off-policy evaluation where appropriate, to measure model quality and incremental business impact.\nPartner with engineers to deploy, monitor, retrain, and improve models in production, addressing issues such as data leakage, class imbalance, drift, calibration, and changing market conditions.\nApply quantitative reasoning and statistical modeling to problems involving click-through rate, conversion, return on ad spend, targeting, attribution, identity, and measurement.\nCollaborate with scientists, engineers, and product partners to define objectives, labels, loss functions, reward signals, evaluation metrics, and practical delivery plans.\nContribute to a rigorous, research-oriented team culture through technical communication, code and model reviews, experimentation, and knowledge sharing.\nMUST HAVE\n3-5 years of experience developing and applying machine learning models, ideally in production or research environments with measurable outcomes.\nStrong foundation in machine learning, deep learning, probability, statistics, and optimization, with practical experience using Python and frameworks such as PyTorch or TensorFlow.\nCoursework, research, internship, or project experience with reinforcement learning, contextual bandits, sequential decision-making, recommendation systems, online experimentation, or related methods.\nAbility to formulate a machine learning problem precisely, including objectives, labels, features, loss or reward functions, evaluation metrics, and experimental design.\nExperience analyzing large-scale data and communicating technical findings clearly to scientists, engineers, and cross-functional partners.\nInterest in building models that move beyond offline accuracy and improve real-world decisions in production systems.\nExperience with reinforcement learning in advertising, marketplaces, recommendation systems, robotics, games, or other sequential decision-making environments.\nExposure to contextual bandits, off-policy or counterfactual evaluation, causal inference, auction theory, or online experimentation.\nGREAT TO HAVE\nExperience with digital advertising, real-time bidding, audience modeling, ad ranking, personalization, or large-scale recommendation systems is a plus.\nExperience with distributed computing, cloud platforms, LLMs, generative AI, or multimodal AI is also welcome, but the core focus of this role is production-oriented reinforcement learning and decisioning.\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: $160,000 - $200,000\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":6005,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":3,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Health insurance","Parental leave","Unlimited PTO"],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Advertising","Marketing & Sales AI"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-10-20T17:30:18Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":82,"band":"hot","label":"Hiring now","p_open":1,"p_active":0.821,"p_room":1,"age_days":20,"expected_fill_days":64,"reasons":["conf:0","win:early"],"computed_at":"2026-10-23T05:54:15Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":200000,"is_top_pay":false},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/viant-sr-applied-scientist","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/viant-sr-applied-scientist.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-24T04:56:29Z","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":7082,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-25T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"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-sr-applied-scientist"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"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-sr-applied-scientist"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"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-sr-applied-scientist"},{"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-sr-applied-scientist\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fviant-sr-applied-scientist"}]}