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.

About the Team
The Food, Ads & Merchant Data Science team works on some of the most high-leverage problems in GoFood, where smarter ad systems can unlock meaningful growth for merchants and sustainable revenue for the platform. As Indonesia's largest food delivery service, GoFood connects millions of users with their favourite meals every day, and advertising plays a critical role in shaping discovery, choice, and conversion.
We tackle real-world questions at the heart of marketplace dynamics: How do we optimize ad ranking and bidding to balance relevance with revenue? How can we help merchants of all sizes grow through effective, measurable ad solutions? How do we design experimentation strategies that work in noisy, high-stakes environments?
Solving these challenges requires more than just good models—it takes a deep understanding of product, experimentation at scale, and a strong feedback loop between data science, engineering, and business. We're equipped with rich datasets, modern MLOps infrastructure, and strong cross-functional support to move fast and build with confidence.
About GoTo Group GoTo Group is the largest digital ecosystem in Indonesia with its mission to "Empower Progress' by offering technological infrastructure and solutions for everyone to access and thrive in the digital economy. The GoTo ecosystem consists of on-demand transportation services, food and grocery delivery, logistics and fulfillment, as well as financial and payment services through the Gojek and GoTo Financial platforms.It is the first platform in Southeast Asia that hosts these crucial cases in a single ecosystem, capturing the majority of Indonesia's vast consumer household.
About Gojek  Gojek is Southeast Asia's leading on-demand platform and pioneer of the multi-service ecosystem with over 2.5 million driver partners across the regions offering a wide range of services such as transportation, food delivery, logistics and more. With its mission to create impact at scale, Gojek is committed to resolving consumer problems and raising standards of living by connecting consumers to the best providers of goods and services in the market.
About GoTo Financial GoTo Financial accelerates financial inclusion through its leading financial services and merchants solutions. Its consumer services include GoPay and GoPayLater and serve businesses of all sizes through Midtrans, Moka, GoBiz Plus, GoBiz, and Selly. With its trusted and inclusive ecosystem of products, GoTo Financial is open to new growth opportunities and aims to empower everyone to Make It Happen, Make It Together, Make It Last.
GoTo and its business units, including Gojek and GoToFinancial ("GoTo") only post job opportunities on our official channels on our respective company websites and on LinkedIn. GoTo is not liable for any job postings or job offers that did not originate from us. You should conduct your own due diligence to prevent being victims of any fake job scams, if they did not originate from GoTo's official recruitment channels.

#LI-HYBRID We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support parts of the hiring process, such as reviewing applications, analyzing resumes, or assessing responses. These tools assist our recruitment team but do not replace human judgment. Final hiring decisions are ultimately made by humans. If you would like more information about how your data is processed, please contact us.

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