Hiring: Senior Applied Scientist II, Ads Optimization Company: Instacart Location: United States Job Posted Time: 2026-09-11 18:08:23 Target Skills & Keywords : Make, Objective-C, SAFe About the job Experience: •8+ years of experience building and deploying optimization or Required Skills: •Design and evolve real-time bid optimization systems that translate advertiser goals (target ROAS, budget constraints) into optimal auction bids under uncertainty. Formulate the bidding problem as constrained optimization and build the feedback mechanisms that keep bids aligned with realized outcomes. •Build intelligent budget pacing algorithms that distribute spend across time and auction opportunities. The core challenge: allocating a finite daily budget across stochastic demand while maximizing total value, subject to advertiser constraints and time-varying conversion dynamics. •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. Reason about mechanism design tradeoffs between advertiser outcomes, platform revenue, and marketplace efficiency. •Own the full research-to-production loop: diagnose system behavior from large-scale data, formulate hypotheses, design experiments, ship production code, and measure impact. Write technical strategy documents that set the algorithmic direction for the team. Qualifications: •Minimum Qualifications •Graduate degree (Masters 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 Compensation: •$1 Interested candidates, please apply directly through the job posting on company's career page or try via AI auto apply on this platform. Don't miss this opportunity to join a forward-thinking team!