Senior Data Scientist, Ads & Monetisation

Senior Data Scientist, Ads & Monetisation

Bolt

Tallinn or Berlin

About the role:

We are building an advertising and monetization platform, enabling merchants and brands to reach customers through sponsored listings, banners, and targeted promotions across Bolt Food. You'll drive the data science roadmap for Ads - from building automated pricing and bidding engines that maximize value for advertisers and users to integrating sponsored content into our existing ML ranking systems. This is a foundational role: you'll be the first dedicated Data Science hire for Ads & Monetization, working closely with Product, Engineering and Data Science teams.

Main tasks and responsibilities:

• Develop bidding and auction algos that enable fair price discovery and efficient budget allocation.
• Build conversion prediction models (pCTR, pCVR) to power automated CPA/CPO pricing for self-serve merchant advertising.
• Design and implement ranking models that blend sponsored listings with organic results, optimizing for user experience and advertiser ROI.
• Partner with other data science teams to extend existing ranking infrastructure with ads-specific features and signals.
• Design and run experiments to validate pricing approaches, measure incrementality, and estimate causal impact of ad placements.

About you:

• Strong ownership mindset and ability to work autonomously from problem research to production deployment.
• 5+ years of experience working in ads, ranking, recommendation systems or marketplace optimization domains.
• Strong experience with learning-to-rank (LTR) models and recommendation systems.
• Solid understanding of ads auction mechanics, bid optimization, and pricing strategies.
• Proficiency in Python and SQL; experience with CatBoost, XGBoost, or similar gradient boosting frameworks is a plus.