thumbtack - Staff Applied Scientist, Marketplace (Canada-Only)
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Responsibilities
• Set and drive the multi-year technical roadmap for matching, ranking, and recommendation systems across the marketplace. • Architect, build, and deploy production AI systems that serve millions of matches per week, including retrieval, ranking, allocation, and pricing components. • Design and execute marketplace experiments at scale; collaborate with economists and data scientists on causal inference and counterfactual reasoning when randomized testing is constrained. • Lead end-to-end on ambiguous, high-impact problems where the science approach, success metrics, and product framing all need to be defined. • Provide technical mentorship to senior applied scientists; raise the technical bar through design reviews, paper readings, and applied science guild contributions. • Partner with product and engineering leadership to translate marketplace strategy into a science investment plan, and to communicate technical tradeoffs to executive stakeholders. • Represent Thumbtack externally where appropriate: industry-track papers, academic collaborations, recruiting talks. • IN ORDER TO BE SUCCESSFUL, YOU MUST BRING • Ph.D. in a quantitative field (Computer Science, Machine Learning, Statistics, Operations Research, Economics, or related) or equivalent industry experience, plus 8+ years as an applied scientist with end-to-end ownership of production marketplace, recommendation, or ranking systems. • Architected at least one production marketplace, recommendation, or recsys system from problem framing through deployment and ongoing operation, cross-cutting at least three of: retrieval, ranking, allocation, pricing, evaluation. • Advanced knowledge of machine learning techniques (deep learning, learning-to-rank, embeddings and similarity-based approaches, sequence models, causal inference) particularly as applied to matching, recommendation, or marketplace problems; working experience with modern LLMs (OpenAI, Anthropic Claude, Gemini, AWS Bedrock, HuggingFace), the agentic tools built on top of them, and agentic AI development practices. • Advanced knowledge of probability and statistics, including experimental design, predictive modeling, optimization, and causal inference. • Strong coding ability in Python, SQL, and Go, with experience building on large-scale distributed systems (Spark, Kafka, real-time inference platforms). • Track record of external technical contributions: industry publications, patents, or open-source work in recommendation systems, ranking, marketplace mechanics, or related applied ML domains (e.g., RecSys, SIGIR, KDD, WWW, NeurIPS industry tracks). • Demonstrated ability to drive impactful technical roadmaps and lead seamless execution across multiple teams, mentor senior applied scientists, and communicate clearly to cross-functional partners across executive, product, engineering, and economics audiences.
Benefits
• For candidates living in Ontario and British Columbia, the expected salary range for the role is currently $232,100 - $300,300. • Actual offered salaries will vary and will be based on various factors, such as calibrated job level, qualifications, skills, competencies, and proficiency for the role. • Note: Thumbtack uses AI tools to support our resume screening process. However, our Recruiting team’s expertise and judgment guide hiring decisions. • Thumbtack embraces diversity. We are proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and do not discriminate on the basis of sex, race, color, age, pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, religion, national origin, ancestry, citizenship, marital status, military or veteran status, genetic information, disability status, or any other characteristic protected by federal, provincial, state, or local law. We also will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records, consistent with applicable law. • Thumbtack is committed to working with and providing reasonable accommodation to individuals with disabilities. If you would like to request a reasonable accommodation for a medical condition or disability during any part of the application process, please contact: [email protected]. • If you are a California resident, please review information regarding your rights under California privacy laws contained in Thumbtack’s Privacy policy available at https://www.thumbtack.com/privacy/. • We put as much craftsmanship into candidate safety as we do into the hiring experience itself. While scammers may try to impersonate our team, we’ll never ask you for money, banking info, or SSNs during hiring. Check out our blueprint on how to spot the fakes. https://careers.thumbtack.com/recruiting-scams
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