Data Scientist - Advertising

How do you make our customers happy?

Advertising within bol strives to present customers with maximally relevant ads. This is great for our 13 million customers as well as for our advertisers, because relevance is the primary driver of conversion. Particularly in a setting that displays ads during the shopping experience. So matching what customers want/are looking for with partner ads is our ultimate ambition. But can we accomplish that? As a member of bol’s largest innovation club, you answered with a resounding ‘yes!’, because dreaming big and realizing those dreams is what we do. We already have all the right tools, and we know that you can help us get even more out of them.

What you do as Data Scientist Advertising

Our Advertising teams are home to ambitious product owners, data analysts/designers, software engineers and other data scientists, who all work together to maximize our advertising potential for customers and advertisers. You help data analysts to hone their insights by ‘capturing’ insights in models that we can use to automate decisions at scale. With advanced algorithms and machine learning, of course. Delve into a wealth of data sources (such as browsing, purchase, and customer data) to generate insights and features for highly accurate models. This role requires an experimental mindset – we can only build the best data science solution possible based on tested and validated algorithms.

You work with software engineers, data scientists from the Advertising teams and our data analysts to build solid bridges between data and personalized ads for customers. This is where your (machine learning) models make all the difference. And you contribute to innovations from end-to-end. What data can and should we incorporate into the model? What model performs best in tests? How can we take a new model into production? And how can we continue to refine it thereafter? We don’t think you’ll want to sit back and wait for ‘assignments’ here, because we eagerly encourage you to propose your own ideas for innovations and data science applications in the Advertising domain. Your innovation teams consult multiple data sources and use data science to zoom in on, e.g.:

• Enhancing bol as an advertising platform for customers and advertisers
• Displaying the right ad in the right place at the right time
• Automating recommendations for advertisers that want to spend their time (and marketing budgets) more effectively

• Identifying – and taking the lead in this process – valuable new innovations, experiments, and advanced methods

Why you can make the difference

Because you’re a genius in conceptualizing, designing, and developing data science solutions. You have extensive experience with Python, Google BigQuery, Airflow and DBT, and machine learning frameworks like sci-kit learn and PyTorch, XGBoost and CatBoost. You also have an affinity for software engineering and easily find your way in our IT landscape. We embrace a hypotheses-driven approach and expect you to have a passion for experimentation. You are also eager to test and validate your models. We challenge you to propose several scenarios to solve any given problem. This is key to finding the (demonstrably!) best results. You also oversee the technical realization of your solutions into existing or new IT services, so collaborating with software engineers comes with the territory. Speaking of collaborating: stakeholder management skills are a must, as are excellent presentation skills, because you’ll work with colleagues from several domains and need to approach problems from a wide range of perspectives. It’s up to you to distill the optimal solution for a problem while maintaining effortless working relationships and open lines of communication with colleagues in the business and IT domains. And because our environment is in a constant state of flux, our data scientists need to be eager learners. That goes for constantly developing skills as well as for exploring new terrain. You can always count on our community of experienced bol data scientists for support.

• You’re not into tooling No, if BigQuery / Python / Machine Learning is terra incognita
• You’re a soloist No, if you’ve never worked with software engineers and don’t look forward to the experience
• You don’t deviate from the path No, if your natural inclination is to stay on the beaten path: it might be boring, but it feels ever so secure

• Your track record breathes data Yes, if you bring 3+ years of data science experience to the table, preferably in ‘data-driven, personalized marketing’ solutions and technical realizations
• You love lab settings Yes, if you love to experiment and innovate and can get colleagues on board for the ride
• You go from concept to realization Yes, if translating complex questions into the technical realization of scalable models and algorithms is totally your cup of Earl Gray

This is where you’ll work

You’ll land in the Advertising tech fleet, one of our engineering departments that focuses on the different Advertising products. We develop innovations and technical tools to present advertisers with limitless opportunities to showcase their products/services on our platform. We zoom in on strategic topics, such as sponsored products and display advertising, as well as on audiences and the data we can make available to our advertisers.