Principal Data Scientist

About the Role

We’re looking for a data scientist with hands-on experience in advertising to join the Food, Ads & Merchants team at Gojek. This role is laser-focused on helping merchants grow on GoFood through innovative, data-driven ad solutions. You’ll be part of a cross-functional team across Singapore, India, and Indonesia, working at the intersection of advertising, machine learning, and merchant growth.

Your primary mission: design, build, and scale ad systems that drive measurable impact for GoFood merchants. This includes optimizing ad targeting, pricing, and bidding strategies; and uncovering new ways to deliver merchant value through experimentation and modeling.

You’ll collaborate closely with product managers, engineers, and fellow data scientists to shape how merchants reach users and grow sustainably. Your first six months will involve:

• Improving ad ranking and bidding systems to maximize ROI for merchants.
• Designing merchant-facing ad products grounded in data and experimentation.
• Applying causal inference and optimization techniques to drive spend efficiency and merchant success.
• Design rigorous experiments when A/B testing isn’t feasible, using methods like synthetic controls or matching to evaluate ad features and pricing in constrained or high-risk settings.

If you’ve worked in the ads domain and are excited about building ad products that directly influence business outcomes at scale, we’d love to work with you.

What You Will Do

• Translate merchant growth and advertising challenges into well-defined technical problems solvable with data, experimentation, and machine learning.
• Build and scale data science solutions that power GoFood’s ad products, such as bidding systems, sponsored listings, and user/keyword targeting.
• Own the full ML lifecycle: from ideation and modeling to pipeline development, deployment, experimentation, and measurement of impact on key merchant and platform metrics.
• Improve ad ranking, targeting, and pricing algorithms using techniques from causal inference, optimization, and user behavior modeling.
• Design and interpret experiments by applying quasi-experimental and A/B testing methods.
• Collaborate closely with product and business stakeholders to shape ad strategy and drive measurable outcomes for merchants.
• Communicate technical decisions, insights, and trade-offs clearly to cross-functional teams, and operate independently in fast-moving and ambiguous problem spaces.

What You Will Need

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in a quantitative field (e.g., Computer Science, Statistics, ML) with 10+ years of industry experience.
• Proficient in Python and SQL, with experience working in large-scale data environments.
• Strong in statistics, machine learning, and causal inference, with a track record of solving real-world problems.
• Practical experience with ad ranking, targeting, or bidding systems.
• Familiarity with ad tech concepts like CTR prediction, auction dynamics, and budget pacing.
• Strong problem framing skills: able to turn loosely defined product or business questions into well-scoped, data-driven solutions.
• Clear communicator, comfortable sharing insights across technical and non-technical teams.
• End-to-end ownership of DS workflows, from data exploration and hypothesis testing to experimentation and impact reporting.
• Self-motivated, execution-focused, and eager to build ad solutions that drive merchant growth.

Bonus Points If You Have

• Experience working with Chinese cloud platforms like Alibaba Cloud or Tencent Cloud.
• Familiarity with modern software engineering workflows, including Git, CI/CD, and Docker.
• Experience with causal inference techniques such as uplift modeling, instrumental variables, or difference-in-differences.
• Familiarity with Gojek, GoFood, or other on-demand platforms in Southeast Asia.