Data Science & Algorithms Team Lead – AdTech (Real-Time, Production)

Start.io is a sell-side omnichannel advertising platform powered by real-time mobile audiences. We deliver hundreds of millions of ads per day across thousands of global leading apps and websites. Our platform uses AI to deliver more efficient, effective and precise digital advertising campaigns. Our direct integration with thousands of mobile publishers gives us access to more than 50 billion first-party data signals per day across the globe. Marketers use these anonymized signals to understand and predict consumer behavior, identify new opportunities and fuel business growth.

We are looking for a Data Science & Algorithms Team Lead to manage and grow a multidisciplinary team (Data Scientists, Data Engineers, and MLOps), building and operating real-time, production-grade algorithmic solutions in a high-scale AdTech environment.

This role blends hands-on technical leadership, system-level design, and people management, working on large-scale, low-latency systems that have direct impact on core business KPIs.

Responsibilities:

• Lead, mentor, and grow a team of data scientists, ML engineers, and analysts.
• Own the end-to-end lifecycle of algorithmic solutions from translating business needs into a data science problem formulation, researching and proposing solutions, defining required data sources and transformations, and designing the supporting infrastructure, to establishing production-grade testing, monitoring, and value measurement.
• Design and constantly deliver low-latency algorithms and their modifications, in production. Including designing low latency feature store.
• Define and drive monitoring, QA, data drift, and model quality standards, ensuring reliability and continuous improvement.
• Work closely with DevOps/MLOps to ensure the solution runs on scalable and highly reliable infrastructure.
• Coordinate and align efforts across multiple teams - Data, DataOps, MLOps, Analytics, BI, and QA to ensure smooth delivery and execution.
• Collaborate closely with Product, Engineering, Infrastructure, and Business stakeholders in a fast-paced environment.
• Drive the team’s technical direction, actively participating in idea generation, solution design, and design reviews.

Requirements:

• MSc in Computer Science, Mathematics, Statistics, or a related field.
• Strong background in Data Science, Reinforcement Learning, and classical ML for tabular data.
• At least 3 years of proven team leadership experience in real-time, production systems.
• Experience leading or mentoring technical teams.
• Strong hands-on skills in Python and common ML libraries (e.g., regression/classification, XGBoost / LightGBM, recommendation systems, etc.).
• Solid understanding of databases and SQL for data retrieval and analysis.
• Familiarity with monitoring/alerting tools such as Grafana and Kibana.
• Strong analytical mindset and ability to thrive in a dynamic and changing environment.
• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to clearly explain complex technical concepts to management and cross-functional teams.

Advantage:

• Experience in the programmatic advertising ecosystem (DSPs, SSPs, MMPs, RTB exchanges) is a strong advantage