Staff Data Scientist - Paid Marketing Optimization

About the role

Preply is hiring a Staff Data Scientist focused on paid marketing optimization in Barcelona. The role sits within a growing Data Team that works with product, business and platform teams, and partners with the MarTech Product Manager, Marketeers, Tech Leads and the Data Strategy team. It suits someone with a real interest in marketing bidding and the ability to work with a lot of ambiguity.

Key responsibilities

• Create the Creative Analytics framework (creative performance modeling), drive its findings into decisions with creative and media-buying teams, and automate detection, reporting and action with MarTech; longer term, build models that separate what a creative causes from what the algorithm delivers.
• Predict cohort maturity (conversion-lag prediction) to minimize steering delay and connect current spend to conversions that have not yet happened.
• Optimize bidding signals (value-based bidding) with channel managers and the Applied AI team, improving the predicted conversion value sent to Google and Meta.
• Build customer uplift models to identify incremental value and create audiences that improve marketing efficiency, feeding prospecting seeds, remarketing audiences and exclusion lists back to the networks.
• Work with Data Engineering and Applied AI on scalable data pipelines, ETL evolution and new tools and frameworks.

Required profile

• Experience with marketing or attribution data and a working understanding of how bidding platforms consume signals; running campaigns is not required.
• Advanced modeling, including propensity models and uplift models.
• Causal inference and experiment design, separating what a channel drives from what it takes credit for.
• Ability to turn business hypotheses into testable experiments and to admit when data cannot answer a question.
• Comfort collaborating across teams you do not control.
• Background in marketing DS, ads ML, recommender systems or similar applied ML roles.

Required skills

• Python and SQL
• Distributed frameworks such as Spark (the company uses Databricks)

What we offer

• A competitive financial package with equity, leave allowance and health insurance.
• Monthly allowance for lessons on Preply, a learning and development budget and time off for self-development.
• Relocation package for candidates not based in Barcelona.
• Free mental health support platforms and access to Gympass wellness and gym centers in Spain.