[Hiring] Lead Data Scientist @Launch Potato

Role Description

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.

Qualifications

• 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.

Requirements

• 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.

Benefits

• Base salary is set according to market rates for the nearest major metro and varies based on Launch Potato’s Levels Framework.
• Your compensation package includes a base salary, profit-sharing bonus, and competitive benefits.
• Launch Potato is a performance-driven company, which means once you are hired, future increases will be based on company and personal performance, not annual cost of living adjustments.