Thrad
Applied Scientist
San Francisco
Sponsorship not specifiedDetected 102 days ago
PythonFastAPIAlgorithmsGitPostgreSQLAWSDockerCI/CDMachine LearningPyTorchNLPComputer VisionLLMsStatisticsResearch
About the role
- Ad selection inside LLM chats is a genuinely new problem: no click history, no cookies, no page context.
- Just an evolving conversation and a few hundred milliseconds to make a decision that has to feel native to the user, relevant to the advertiser, and profitable for the publisher.
- This is a research role with a production mandate.
Responsibilities
- Own the research and shipping of the models powering ad selection across Thrad's network.
- Collaborate directly with the CTO and co-founders to translate research direction into working systems, often within the same day.
- Partner with the Data and Product teams to design and analyze live experiments on real traffic.
Requirements
- You know why your model works, not just that it does.
- You have shipped ML to production at scale.
- You enjoy identifying and owning hard, open-ended problems.
- Experience with RLHF, preference modeling, or LLM fine-tuning.
- Familiarity with ClickHouse or other column-oriented OLAP databases for analytical workloads.
Nice to have
- Productionize regression models to predict downstream conversion from early conversational signals.
- Apply privacy-preserving clustering methods to categorize conversational context and improve advertiser targeting without compromising user data.
- Run live experiments against real traffic on our publisher network.
- Iterate on CTR, ROAS, and conversation quality metrics.
- Read an ArXiv paper on Monday.
- Have a prototype running on Friday.
- Contribute to system architecture decisions as we scale from millions to billions of daily ad impressions.
- Communicate findings clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences across the team.
Benefits
- Meaningful equity in a company at the intersection of two massive markets: AI and ad tech.
Company info
- We are defining a new category.
- Paid ads in AI is an inevitable market and we are building the infrastructure for it.
- Small founding team.
- Your decisions shape the models, the product, and the company.
This listing is sourced directly from Thrad's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.