Ad Tech, Machine Learning Engineer

Job Overview

This position is for an Ad Tech Engineer, Machine Learning Engineer- Marketplace role at Mercari. The role is full-time with full flextime (no core time) and is based at the Roppongi office.

About Mercari

Circulate all forms of value to unleash the potential in all people. The Mercari marketplace app was born in 2013 out of this thought by our founder Shintaro Yamada as he traveled the world. We believe that by circulating all forms of value, not just physical things and money, we can create opportunities for anyone to realize their dreams and contribute to society and the people around them. Mercari aims to use technology to connect people all over the world and create a world where anyone can unleash their potential.

Organization/Team Mission

In the Ads Optimization Team, Mercari Ads offers various advertising solutions such as those for C2C sellers, Shops sellers, and external advertisers. The Ads Optimization Team is responsible for the overall optimization logic to achieve campaign goals for advertisements handled by Mercari Ads. The team improves advertising effectiveness using technologies such as search, recommendations, and machine learning.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead optimization areas in the Ad-Tech domain.
• Utilize data science and machine learning technologies to identify business challenges, develop and implement models, and continuously improve productivity and reliability through iterative enhancements.
• Focus on mid to long-term business goals and impact, propose key issues to be resolved, and prioritize them effectively.
• Employ a data-driven approach to formulate hypotheses, design evaluation strategies, and develop appropriate machine learning models.
• Propose, promote, implement, and validate business improvement plans.
• Develop and maintain machine learning models in the advertising domain, including recommendation systems, matching optimization, and ad classification.
• Apply statistical and data science techniques to uncover product insights and drive optimization based on business logic.
• Enhance the performance of advanced machine learning models by leveraging embeddings for images and text.
• Design time-series models to evaluate advertising effectiveness and optimize advertising budget strategies.

Unique Challenges

Develop advertising solutions for media with over 20 million MAUs. Mercari's advertising solutions are still in the early stages, but they are expected to make a significant impact on Japan's advertising market. Challenge revolutionary advertising initiatives beyond traditional frameworks. By utilizing extensive product, fintech, and user behavior data, it is possible to tackle predictive modeling challenges and create business impact. Focus on not only accuracy but also business impact and user experience (UX) during model development. Participate in creating high-quality products with machine learning as a core competency. Lead the entire lifecycle of machine learning products, from planning and proposing to development and deployment.

Required Qualifications

• Someone who can align with the mission and values of the Mercari Group and its companies.
• Experience in leading the optimization domain in Ad-Tech and creating significant business impact.
• Basic knowledge of the digital marketing domain.
• Experience in constructing the entire process from planning and designing data analysis to performing analysis and delivering actual outputs.
• Programming skills in SQL, Python, and Go.
• A deep understanding of the fundamentals of machine learning and software engineering.
• Experience building models using machine learning libraries such as scikit-learn and LightGBM.
• Basic to intermediate knowledge of statistics and data science.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in developing microservices using k8s.
• Experience in building and operating large-scale ETL or ELT pipelines.
• Experience in developing and operating recommendation models for advertisements.
• Experience in large-scale search systems.

Language Requirements

Japanese: Native (required) / English: B2 (required)
English: Native/Fluent (required) / Japanese: nice to have