Principal Data Scientist - Vendor Recommendations & AI

Job Description

We are on the lookout for a Principal Data Scientist to join the AdTech data science team (Vendor Recommendations and AI) on our journey to always deliver amazing experiences.

As part of our Vendor Team, you’ll be the driving force behind the success of thousands of restaurants, shops, and local businesses. Your contributions will empower vendors with advanced tools to manage their operations, boosting their visibility, and reach. Every feature you help build will create growth opportunities for businesses of all sizes, strengthening Delivery Hero’s ecosystem and impact.

At Delivery Hero, AdTech introduces people to new food they love and enables our partners to meet their future customers at the perfect moment. We have developed a range of products to offer advertising solutions for restaurants helping them to increase their visibility and reach, improve their order conversion, and eventually drive more sales by covering the entire marketing funnel. Operating across over 50 countries around the clock, our Ad Tech connects the ideal advertiser with the ideal customer millions of times every day. Ad Tech is a fundamental area for us on our path to profitability. our data science team is at the heart of this growth, powering personalisation, Ranking, relevance, and recommendation.

• End-to-End Ownership: Lead the design, build, and deployment of large-scale AI recommendation systems that deliver multi-million-euro business outcomes for the vendor vertical.

• Next Best Action (NBA) Framework: Own the architecture and modeling for determining the optimal sequence and timing of actions (eg ad suggestions, promotional offers, operational advice) to maximize vendor success metrics.

• Strategic Time-Series & Forecasting: Lead all core initiatives in advanced time series modeling for demand prediction, vendor forecasting, and understanding long-term trends in the vendor base.

• Commercial Insights & Take Rate: Act as the technical authority for take rate optimisation, using statistical rigour and causal methods to measure the incrementality and efficiency of all vendor-facing pricing and adtech levers.

• Cross-Functional Alignment: Act as the primary technical partner for Product, Engineering, and Commercial teams to validate or debunk business hypotheses and drive alignment on the recommendations strategy.

Qualifications

Recommendation Systems & Sequential Authority:

• Recommendation Architect: Expert practitioner in designing, building, and deploying large-scale, high-performance recommendation systems (e.g., two-tower, deep sequence models, Graph Neural Networks) for the B2B or marketplace domain.

• Sequential/Timeseries Specialist: Thought leader in using timeseries analysis and sequence modeling (eg LSTMs, transformers, advanced forecasting) for vendor behavior, next-best-action prediction, and demand forecasting.

• Causal Inference for Action: Proven ability to apply causal inference and advanced experimentation frameworks to quantify the true incremental impact of recommendations and vendor-facing product features.

• Take Rate Analysis: Deep expertise in the analytical frameworks and models required for optimizing key commercial metrics like take rate, vendor LTV, and churn prediction.

Advanced AI & Statistical Engineering:

• Multi-Objective Optimization: Mastery in formulating and solving problems that balance potentially conflicting vendor KPIs - such as maximizing short-term revenue/take rate while maintaining vendor engagement and long-term retention/success.

• Algorithmic Decisioning: Deep experience in designing and deploying real-time decision-making algorithms that power "Next Best Action" systems and adapt to shifting vendor and market conditions.

• Probabilistic Modeling: Strong foundation in Bayesian methods and uncertainty quantification to provide reliable forecasts and confidence intervals around business-critical projections.

• Production Excellence: Deep operational knowledge of deploying these sophisticated models using Python frameworks like Keras, scikit-learn.

Strategic Leadership & Influence:

• The "Recommendation North Star": Proven ability to define a 2+ year technical roadmap for Vendor Recommendation Data Science, influencing the strategic direction of Product, Engineering, and Commercial leadership.

• Decision Science Mastery: A track record of translating complex ML/statistical findings into clear, actionable executive narratives (eg explaining the trade-offs of a new recommendation model to senior leadership).

• Force Multiplier: A history of mentoring Staff and Senior Data Scientists, raising the bar for scientific rigour and production ML excellence across the entire organisation.

Nice-to-Haves

• Expertise in Reinforcement Learning (RL), particularly in applying Multi-Agent RL or contextual bandits to sequential decision-making and next-best-action problems.

• Familiarity with Game Theory or Mechanism Design as applied to multi-sided platform optimisation.

• Major Contributions (papers, talks, or libraries) in the fields of Large-Scale Recommendation Systems or Time-Series Forecasting.

• Expertise in designing feature stores and serving pipelines for sequence and time-series features.

Additional Information

Ensuring you and all our Heroes are looked after, happy, and healthy is always on the menu. Because if you’re in good shape, then we’re in good shape.

• Make the most of our hybrid working model and join the team for face-to-face connection and collaboration in our beautiful Berlin campus 2 days a week

• We offer 27 days holiday with an extra day on 2nd and 3rd year of service

• We will support you in developing yourself and your career growth opportunities: 1.000 € Educational Budget, Language Courses, Parental Support and access to the Udemy Business platform to explore a variety of online courses.

• Get moving and release those wonderful, mind-boosting endorphins: Health Checkups, Meditation, Gym & Bicycle Subsidy

• Cash. Dough. Cheddar. Whatever you call it, we’ll help you with it: Employee Share Purchase Plan, Sabbatical Bank, Public Transportation Ticket Discount, Life & Accident Insurance, Corporate Pension Plan

• The power of getting together over some food is unrivaled. Here are a few ways to help you do that. All the yum: Digital Meal Vouchers, Food Vouchers, Corporate Discounts. Courses.

• Wondering what relocating to Berlin is like? In this article, we’ve put together 10 things you should know about moving to Berlin and how Delivery Hero can support you. You can also visit our relocation hub and check out more information about moving to Berlin.

• Ready to prepare for your interview? Check out the list of the 5 most common interview questions and answers created in collaboration with our recruiters.

Ready to join our team? If you’re excited to grow, collaborate and be part of the world’s leading delivery platform, we’d love to hear from you. Apply today!

We believe diversity and inclusion are key to creating not only an exciting product, but also an amazing customer and employee experience. Fostering this starts with hiring - therefore we do not discriminate on the basis of racial identities, religious beliefs, color, national origin, gender identities or expressions, sexual orientations, age, marital or disability statuses, or any other aspect that makes you, you.

We encourage you to let us know if you need any accommodations or specific accessibility support to ensure a smooth interview experience—just let us know with an email to our Inclusion Officer at [email protected].

Severely disabled applicants with equal qualifications will be given preferential consideration.

You're welcome to share your pronouns (he/she/they) right from the start so we can address you respectfully from our first contact.