Vice President, Research, Yahoo DSP

A little about us

Yahoo DSP is a rapidly growing demand-side platform, and it runs one of the largest real-time decision systems in advertising. Every time someone opens a news story, starts a streaming show, plays a podcast, or walks past a digital billboard, an auction runs, and it’s over in about a tenth of a second. We bid in those auctions hundreds of billions of times a day across connected TV, video, display, audio, native, and digital out-of-home, for advertisers who spend billions of dollars a year with us. Each bid is a science prediction, an economics-defined price, and a control-system derived pacing decision made under uncertainty, at a scale that few science teams ever touch.

We have signals most of the market doesn’t: purchases from Yahoo Mail (more than $25 billion in receipts a month), intent from Search, and interests from Yahoo’s content, tied to 213 million authenticated users through Yahoo ConnectID. DSP Research turns those signals into outcomes. We use machine learning to value impressions when conversions are sparse and delayed, bid just enough to win, pace budgets against uncertain supply, and find the cleanest path to every publisher. We need to build a research organization that will rebuild the decision engine for a world that is increasingly connected and connected through connected TV. 

A lot about you

You are a scientist who has built and run a research organization that ships. You’ve published, you still read the papers, but you are deeply embedded in AI. You’re a teacher, a business owner, and you love to dive into the numbers. You question every requirement and conclusion, especially your own. You are a passionate collaborator with engineers and believe anyone can do real science with enough support.

You’ll lead a significant global DSP Research organization and grow it. You’ll set the research strategy with Product and Engineering, decide what we will and won’t study, and defend the time it takes to do work that pays off in quarters, not sprints. As the most senior researcher in the DSP organization, you’ll help set business priorities and lead research initiatives across the broader Yahoo science community. 

Everyone in the DSP Engineering team is an agentic builder, and you’ll help us reinvent how research gets done: you’ll lead your team to experiment with agents that propose hypotheses, run cheap tests, and create synthetic data. You’ll build a transparent organization where people feel safe to challenge the same requirements and conclusions that you challenge.

Your day

• Own the DSP research strategy and roadmap. Choose investments by business impact, size of the capability gap, and where science creates differentiated value. Say no to the rest, out loud and with reasons.
• Turn research into production. Partner with engineering so new models, controllers, and bidding strategies move from offline results to A/B tests to 100% of traffic, with clear validation standards and rollback.
• Set the scientific bar for DSP: experimentation and evaluation methodology, offline-to-online validation, and the statistical standards everyone uses to decide whether something worked.
• Build the organization. Hire scientists and research leaders, grow the leaders you have, define research career paths and evaluation so researchers aren’t graded on sprint velocity, and set our publication and external-engagement policy on purpose.
• Protect exploration. Fund a named share of research capacity for longer-horizon work, such as identity, audiences, and connected TV prediction, and keep it from being consumed by the urgent.
• Lead agentic research: the harness, the skills, and the metrics that prove research throughput and quality are going up.
• Lead and improve frontier research and papers across select conferences, globally.
• Connect DSP research across Yahoo. Work with the owned-and-operated, identity, audience, and data teams so signals and science move between business units.
• Explain the science to executives, partners, and customers. Each update says what changed, how we measured it, what it’s worth, and what’s next, in language a non-scientist can act on.

You must have

• A PhD in computer science, electrical engineering, operations research, statistics, mathematics, economics, or a related quantitative field.
• You’ve built and led a research or applied science organization of 15 or more people, including leaders of other scientists, and grown it.
• Your organization’s research has shipped in large-scale production systems and moved business metrics you can name.
• Deep expertise in at least one of machine learning for large-scale prediction, online learning, optimization, control, or auction and mechanism design, and the judgment to lead across all of them.
• You’ve set experimentation standards: A/B testing, causal inference or off-policy evaluation, and offline-to-online validation.
• You use AI agents in your own research or engineering work, and you know where they fail and how to verify what they produce.
• You’ve changed the direction of executives and partner teams you didn’t manage, and you can name the decisions that changed.
• You write clearly and briefly. You can make the case for a research bet in two pages and defend it with data.
• You typically bring 15 or more years in research and applied science, including several years leading research teams.

Nice to have

• You’ve worked on computational advertising, real-time bidding, or another auction marketplace.
• You’ve published at venues such as NeurIPS, ICML, KDD, WWW, WSDM, or EC, or hold relevant patents.
• You’ve worked on connected TV, identity graphs, or audience modeling.
• You’ve led research teams across countries and time zones, such as the United States, Europe, and India.
• You’ve built research that served several business units or a shared platform.

What success looks like in your first year

• The 2027 research roadmap hits 80% of its OKRs and you’ve built an inspiring roadmap for 2028. You’ve set Yahoo DSP up as a performance leader thanks to innovations in applying modern models and techniques.
• Research has an operating model that lasts: annual allocations set outside the monthly prioritization cycle, a named exploration budget, and an evaluation rubric built for scientists.
• The organization has grown with the hires we planned, your leaders are stronger than when you arrived, and our best scientists stay.
• The agentic research harness is in daily use, and validated research output per scientist is measurably higher.
• You’re consulted in Yahoo-wide research initiatives and know where we can share, as well as where we should cheer from the sidelines.
• Engineering, Product, and Finance treat research results as decision-grade.

The material job duties and responsibilities of this role include those listed above as well as adhering to Yahoo policies; exercising sound judgment; working effectively, safely and inclusively with others; exhibiting trustworthiness and meeting expectations; and safeguarding business operations and brand integrity.

At Yahoo, we offer flexible hybrid work options that our employees love! While most roles don’t require regular office attendance, you may occasionally be asked to attend in-person events or team sessions. You’ll always get notice to make arrangements. Your recruiter will let you know if a specific job requires regular attendance at a Yahoo office or facility. If you have any questions about how this applies to the role, just ask the recruiter!

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The compensation for this position ranges from $253,050.00 - $469,950.00/yr and will vary depending on factors such as your location, skills and experience.The compensation package may also include incentive compensation opportunities in the form of discretionary annual bonus or commissions, in addition to equity incentives. Our comprehensive benefits include healthcare, a great 401k, backup childcare, education stipends and much (much) more.

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