Senior Director, Machine Learning

Fetch•Reston, VA

7d•Hybrid

About The Position

AI & Data at Fetch sit at the center of how we understand our business, make decisions, and build intelligent products. The organization operates as an integrated AI & data ecosystem, spanning multiple disciplines, including data engineering, analytics engineering, machine learning, experimentation, and data platforms, all working together to turn data into durable business and customer impact. Teams operate in complex problem spaces where requirements evolve, tradeoffs are constant, and the right answer is rarely obvious. Success depends on strong technical judgment, comfort with ambiguity, and the ability to gather context and make informed decisions while balancing quality, performance, scalability, and responsible use. Practitioners across this org contribute hands-on to production systems, analytical foundations, and intelligent features. You will collaborate closely with product, platform, and engineering partners, help shape standards and best practices, and ensure our AI and data capabilities scale reliably as Fetch grows. Fetch is looking for a Senior Director, Machine Learning to lead the strategy and execution behind how we optimize and deliver offers and ads across the Fetch platform. This leader will own a critical business and technical domain spanning ads delivery, ads infrastructure, ranking, relevance, forecasting, pacing, personalization, and optimization. You will lead managers, technical leads, and senior ICs responsible for high-scale ML systems that power user engagement, advertiser outcomes, and business growth. This role requires a leader who has operated at meaningful scale, brings deep technical judgment from prior hands-on experience, and can set direction across complex systems where user experience, partner performance, platform quality, and monetization must be balanced. The ideal candidate understands the end-to-end ads, recommendations, or personalization funnel and has strong opinions on relevance, ranking quality, experimentation, optimization, and marketplace trade-offs. You will influence technical strategy across teams, coach leaders, and hold a high bar for delivery, technical rigor, and organizational health.

Requirements

10+ years of experience in machine learning, software engineering, data science, or a related technical discipline.
5+ years of experience leading teams, managers, or technical leaders in a high-scale technology environment.
Experience operating ML, ranking, ads, recommendations, personalization, or optimization systems at scale.
Deep experience with ads delivery, ranking, relevance, personalization, forecasting, pacing, marketplace quality, or optimization.
Strong technical foundation developed through prior hands-on experience as an engineer, ML practitioner, applied scientist, data scientist, or technical lead.
Proven ability to define technical direction across multiple teams, including system architecture, platform capability, and engineering leverage.
Strong judgment around ML system design, experimentation, model evaluation, ranking quality, marketplace dynamics, and technical trade-offs.
Experience influencing senior stakeholders and aligning cross-functional partners around technical priorities and business outcomes.
Experience coaching managers, technical leads, and senior ICs.
Track record of building inclusive, high-performing teams with strong ownership, engagement, and execution discipline.

Nice To Haves

Experience leading ads delivery, ad ranking, ad relevance, ads infrastructure, or ads marketplace teams at a scaled consumer technology, retail media, marketplace, social, search, gaming, or ad tech company.
Experience with large-scale recommendations, personalization, retrieval and ranking systems, auction dynamics, yield optimization, or real-time decisioning platforms.
Experience with forecasting, pacing, budget optimization, campaign delivery, or performance prediction.
Experience working in a two-sided or multi-sided marketplace.
Familiarity with experimentation platforms, A/B testing, offline and online evaluation, causal measurement, model monitoring, and production ML operations.
Experience with modern ML tooling, feature platforms, real-time serving systems, distributed data processing, and cloud-based infrastructure.
Experience partnering with go-to-market or commercial teams on advertiser, brand, or partner-facing outcomes.
Experience scaling systems, teams, and processes in a high-growth environment.

Responsibilities

Own the machine learning strategy and execution for Fetch’s ads and offers optimization domain.
Lead teams responsible for ads delivery, ads infrastructure, ranking, relevance, forecasting, pacing, personalization, and optimization.
Define technical direction across multiple teams, systems, and stakeholders.
Translate ambiguous business problems into clear technical strategies, system-level decisions, and measurable execution plans.
Ensure architectural coherence, platform reliability, model quality, and operational excellence across the domain.
Partner with Product, Engineering, Data Science, Analytics, Sales, and business stakeholders to align ML investments with user experience, advertiser performance, and company growth.
Lead trade-off decisions involving relevance, pacing, yield, monetization, marketplace dynamics, latency, scalability, and long-term platform health.
Coach and develop managers, technical leads, and senior ICs to raise standards for technical judgment, execution, and team effectiveness.
Build scalable mechanisms for planning, hiring, performance management, technical review, and accountability.
Own domain-level outcomes across technical quality, product progress, business impact, delivery performance, and organizational health.