Senior Data Scientist

Taboola•Los Angeles, CA

5d•$138,500 - $188,000•Hybrid

About The Position

As a Data Scientist on Taboola’s R&D Team in Downtown Los Angeles, utilizing some of the latest technology and tools, you will work on the recommendation and ranking algorithms that drive Realize — Taboola's performance advertising platform serving 600M+ daily active users — and building agentic AI systems alongside it. The models you build directly influence campaign performance and revenue outcomes for advertisers worldwide.

Requirements

Master’s degree or Ph.D, ideally in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Physics, Computational Economics, or similar
5+ years of hands-on experience in Python and Java
Proficiency with ML frameworks (e.g., PyTorch, Tensorflow, Spark MLlib)
SQL proficiency for data exploration and analysis
System-architecture mindset — ability to design scalable, reliable, high-performance systems and reason about how a model fits into the larger data and serving infrastructure.
Experience taking end-to-end ownership of ML systems: design, build, ship, measure, and maintain — using AI-assisted “vibe coding” tools (e.g., Cursor, Claude, GitHub Copilot).
Experience building automated evaluation harnesses and test frameworks for ML systems — defining benchmarks, baselines, and guardrails that let a team ship confidently and repeatedly
Ability to communicate technical findings clearly, and to collaborate effectively across teams (including early morning or evening syncs with our Tel Aviv team)

Nice To Haves

Experience with recommendation systems, ranking algorithms, or personalization at scale
Familiarity with real-time ML and large-scale data mining

Responsibilities

Design and build predictive customer behavior models for targeting and personalization
Implement the applicable Machine Learning or statistics based algorithm for prediction and optimization and deliver the trained model to production
Take end-to-end ownership: design, build, ship, measure, and maintain models and the services around them—rapidly prototyping and delivering complete projects/products using AI-assisted “vibe coding” workflows.
Act as a Harness Engineer: build the evaluation harnesses, automated testing frameworks, benchmarks, and guardrails that let the team experiment, measure model quality, and ship AI/ML systems safely and repeatedly, following a TDD process.
Present findings to the product team and technical team leads in a clear and actionable way.
Build and maintain code to populate HDFS, Hadoop with log from Kafka or data loaded from SQL production systems
Design, build and support algorithms of data transformation, conversion, computation on Hadoop, Spark and other distributed Big Data Systems