Senior SWE/MLE - Bidder Quality - Pricing Algorithms

About Moloco: 

Moloco is a machine learning company empowering organizations of all sizes to grow and unlock the full value of their unique first-party data, elevating the traditional path to performance advertising. While the largest technology companies have proven the speed and scale of ad targeting using data, that same robust performance powered by machine learning has previously been unavailable beyond their platforms. 

That's where Moloco steps in. With Moloco's powerful combination of cutting-edge machine learning technologies, we play a unique and visible role in shaping the digital economy, all while enabling companies to stay independent and scale.

An industry leader at the nexus of machine learning, performance marketing, and visionary product infrastructure, Moloco is advancing the advertising technology industry. We ranked in the top 10% of the Inc. 5000 fastest-growing private companies for 2023. We were recognized as one of 46 leading Cloud Computing companies, receiving the Stratus Award for 2023. That same year, we also received Google’s Cloud DevOps Dreamers Award, given to companies implementing DevOps practices to drive organizational success and high performance. Lastly, Moloco is a 2024-certified Great Place to Work! 

Moloco is headquartered in Silicon Valley, with offices in San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, Seattle, London, Berlin, Seoul, Singapore, Beijing, Gurgaon, Bangalore, Tel Aviv, and Tokyo.

Creating a diverse workforce and a culture of inclusion and belonging is core to our existence. To reach our goals, diversity of talent and thought is a critical component of how we operate as an organization. Our workforce is our superpower, and we know that fostering a culture of inclusion, authenticity, and belonging gives us the greatest opportunity to carry out our mission, to empower businesses of all sizes to grow through operational machine learning.

Moloco is a truly rewarding place to work and in an exciting period of growth, which you could be a part of. Join us today and apply now!

The impact you'll be contributing to Moloco:

We seek an exceptional engineer with a strong computer science + mathematics foundation to join Moloco’s Bidder Quality team. In this role, you'll leverage the state-of-the-art technology stack that Moloco uses to drive our ML-powered performance ads business to determine bidding/pricing decisions. 

The Bidder Quality team owns the final bidding and pricing decisions that we are making for advertising campaigns. An example system component that the team builds is the bid price optimizer for first-price auction based open internet ad inventories. The team focuses on the operation and optimization of our software systems working closely with infrastructure engineering teams and machine learning teams.

As a Senior Software Engineer on our Machine Learning Engineer (MLE) team, you will lead research projects and may lead small teams of MLEs as part of a broader group of cross functional collaborators working together to solve challenging problems in a complex multi-causal environment. Your work will contribute to driving performance improvements and cost reductions as you and your team debug and investigate production issues and stabilize our core system through deep end-to-end understanding.

Here’s what you’ll be working on:

• If you've worked on bidding, bidder quality, ads quality, this role is for you.
• Design and implement real-time bidding and pricing algorithms for a high-scale advertising system (7M QPS), using optimization techniques, auction theory, and machine learning fundamentals.
• Leverage adtech experience to improve auction outcomes and bidding strategies, drawing from a strong understanding of advertising ecosystem dynamics (e.g., DSPs, SSPs, auctions).
• Develop scalable and cost-efficient ad serving systems, with strong system design principles to support performance advertising at scale.
• Conduct deep root-cause analyses of ad performance issues, using statistical reasoning and quantitative methods to drive unbiased insights and corrective actions.
• Identify opportunities to optimize the ad delivery pipeline, including reducing system or serving costs while maintaining performance, using efficient algorithms and data structures.
• Collaborate cross-functionally with product, infra, and account teams to anticipate the business impact of system changes and define future product roadmaps with a strong sense of p