Senior SWE/MLE - Pricing Algorithms - Auction Mechanisms

About Moloco:

Moloco builds some of the most powerful AI advertising solutions in the world. Our name—short for "machine learning company"—reflects our core mission: democratizing access to the advanced AI that has historically been reserved for tech giants. Led by machine learning pioneers who built some of the most successful ad systems at Google, including YouTube's monetization engine and key search advertising technologies, we're transforming how businesses grow and compete in the digital economy.

Built with AI from day one, Moloco’s planet-scale machine learning platform powers a suite of solutions for advertising growth and monetization. Moloco Ads is an AI-powered platform that delivers real business outcomes for mobile app marketers through performance-based user acquisition. Moloco Commerce Media and Streaming Monetization solutions enable retailers, marketplaces, and streaming platforms to build revenue-generating ad businesses that balance user experience and advertiser performance.

Moloco is headquartered in Silicon Valley, with offices in Seattle, New York, San Francisco, Seoul, Beijing, Singapore, Bangalore, Gurgaon, Tokyo, Shanghai, London, Tel Aviv, and Berlin.

Creating a diverse workforce and a culture of inclusion and belonging is core to our existence. To reach our goals, diversity of talent and thought is a critical component of how we operate as an organization. Our workforce is our superpower, and we know that fostering a culture of inclusion, authenticity, and belonging gives us the greatest opportunity to achieve our vision to become the scaling engine for the Internet economy.

Moloco is a truly rewarding place to work and in an exciting period of growth, which you could be a part of. Join us today and apply now!

The impact you'll be contributing to Moloco:

We seek an exceptional engineer with a strong computer science + mathematics foundation to join Moloco’s Bidder Quality team. In this role, you'll leverage the state-of-the-art technology stack that Moloco uses to drive our ML-powered performance ads business to determine bidding/pricing decisions. 

The Bidder Quality team owns the final bidding and pricing decisions that we are making for advertising campaigns. An example system component that the team builds is the bid price optimizer for first-price auction based open internet ad inventories. The team focuses on the operation and optimization of our software systems working closely with infrastructure engineering teams and machine learning teams.

As a Senior Software Engineer on our Machine Learning Engineer (MLE) team, you will lead research projects and may lead small teams of MLEs as part of a broader group of cross functional collaborators working together to solve challenging problems in a complex multi-causal environment. Your work will contribute to driving performance improvements and cost reductions as you and your team debug and investigate production issues and stabilize our core system through deep end-to-end understanding.

Here’s what you’ll be working on:

• If you've worked on bidding, bidder quality, ads quality, this role is for you.
• Design and implement real-time bidding and pricing algorithms for a high-scale advertising system (7M QPS), using optimization techniques, auction theory, and machine learning fundamentals.
• Leverage adtech experience to improve auction outcomes and bidding strategies, drawing from a strong understanding of advertising ecosystem dynamics (e.g., DSPs, SSPs, auctions).
• Develop scalable and cost-efficient ad serving systems, with strong system design principles to support performance advertising at scale.
• Conduct deep root-cause analyses of ad performance issues, using statistical reasoning and quantitative methods to drive unbiased insights and corrective actions.
• Identify opportunities to optimize the ad delivery pipeline, including reducing system or serving costs while maintaining performance, using efficient algorithms and data structures.
• Collaborate cross-functionally with product, infra, and account teams to anticipate the business impact of system changes and define future product roadmaps with a strong sense of product intuition and operational awareness.
• Stay informed on system-level and data-level changes, and work with collaborators to improve infrastructure and ML model performance in response.

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science with mathematical (ex, stats) coursework
• 6+ years of overall work experience (industry or postgraduate) in research related fields focused on optimization of market prices or ML systems
• Proven experience working in the adtech space—preferably with exposure to auction-based systems and real-time bidding environments.
• Strong mathematical or statistical background (e.g., optimization, probability, hypothesis testing).
• Solid understanding of business metrics, with an ability to translate technical changes into business outcomes.
• Strong system design skills, with experience in designing scalable, fault-tolerant distributed systems.
• Familiarity with cost-aware engineering practices—ability to optimize for compute, memory, and latency trade-offs.
• Hands-on coding ability in production-level codebases (e.g., C++, Java, Go, or Python).
• Working knowledge of machine learning principles, particularly in applied settings like ranking, predictions, or decision systems.
• Ph.D degree in Applied Mathematics, Operations Research, Management Science or related field a plus.