Head of Data Science - adjoe Ads

Job title: Head of Data Science - adjoe Ads

About the Role Lead and grow the Data Science team powering adjoe Ads' programmatic in-app bidding. You’ll own the bidding algorithm end-to-end—from research and experimentation to deployment and real-time inference—driving billions of ad decisions daily on a 350TB data lake with sub-200ms latency.

What You'll Do

• Grow and manage the team of Data Scientists, Data & ML Engineers, and Data Analysts that own the entire bidding algorithm.
• Be at least 50% hands-on: work on data science tasks, own experiments and implementation details, and mentor others in modeling quality and coding practices.
• Architect and deploy ML solutions including recommender systems and neural networks; own the full ML lifecycle from research to production and real-time inference.
• Ensure real-time performance with sub-200ms latency and billions of predictions daily (50B+).
• Collaborate with product and Cloud Infrastructure on priorities, tools, and best practices.
• Contribute to long-term strategy and quarterly OKRs; help position adjoe Ads as a leader in programmatic adtech.
• Work with large-scale data sources (AWS Athena, Kafka, Spark, Flink, S3, MySQL) and extract signals from a 350TB data lake; translate insights into decisions for product and business teams.
• Build and maintain an MLOps stack (experience with Airflow, Spark, or Flink is a strong plus); mentor in modeling quality and production readiness.

What We're Looking For

• 5+ years in Data Science, 2+ in leadership; track record of architecting and deploying ML solutions, recommender systems and neural networks; experience growing data science teams.
• At least 50% hands-on; own critical procedures like experiments and implementation details; mentor others.
• Fluent in working with data at scale: AWS Athena, Kafka, Spark, Flink, S3, MySQL; ability to extract signals from a 350TB data lake.
• Strong Python; experience building an MLOps stack with Airflow, Spark, or Flink is a strong plus.
• Bridges math and business: translate model behavior into clear decisions for product and stakeholders; align with product team and Cloud Infrastructure.
• Contributes to roadmap and quarterly OKRs; able to think long-term and drive strategy.

Nice to Have

• PyTorch and TensorFlow experience; self-hosted ML infrastructure where it matters.
• Experience with 600+ features and training on 200 million data points; full ML lifecycle from research to real-time inference.

Compensation & Benefits

• Impactful projects reaching hundreds of millions of users; move fast and ship solutions multiple times a day.
• Diverse, global team from 40+ countries.
• Relocation support to Hamburg, Germany for those joining us.
• Direct culture: open problem solving and cross-team collaboration.
• Fun, engaging workplace where wins are celebrated and energy is valued.