Senior Go Backend Engineer - Merchant Group

We are looking for a Senior Data Scientist to join the AI Platform Team at Smartly! Our team works on helping marketers make the most of their ad creatives (images, video, text) and campaigns (product and performance data). We build and experiment with AI-based solutions across the media and creative workflows. You will have the opportunity to take ownership of and work on high impact projects. Join us in building high impact ML-based solutions to help our customers to build better and more effective advertising experiences for their consumers. If you’re a growth minded individual who has a passion for Data Science and the marketing space, this team is for you! AS A SENIOR DATA SCIENTIST, YOU’LL: * Implement, build, and deploy scalable models and machine learning solutions that enable our users to craft great advertising experiences and campaigns with a focus on maintainability, observability, scalability and stability. * Own projects end-to-end: from problem framing and data exploration to modeling, validation, and monitoring in production. * Work with a large span of datasets from image to video to audio to text to structured performance data.  * Analyze large-scale datasets to uncover insights, trends, and opportunities that inform product strategy and customer outcomes. * You’ll work alongside our stellar data scientists, senior machine learning engineers, and software engineers to enable us to productionize AI/ML applications more robustly and efficiently. * Be a core contributor of our team and our ways of working to build high impact products. You’ll actively be involved in work planning, retrospectives, and overall team improvement. * Impact the daily life of the staff of the hundreds of advertisers using Smartly  * Work with our stakeholders - be them product, engineering, infrastructure - to ensure we meet customers where they are. Being able to translate business/product needs to viable solutions is a must. * Apply and enhance your soft skills through working closely with your colleagues and our customers. Doing knowledge shares, running productive meetings, and pair programming/debugging are just some ways we grow our soft skills. * Keep up to date with the latest AI innovations, especially in areas such as generative AI, computer vision, natural language processing and explainability.   WHAT WE ARE LOOKING FOR: * 5+ years of experience in data science or applied machine learning * 2+ years of experience working with cloud infrastructure such as AWS or GCP * Strong foundation in linear algebra, statistics, and calculus * Fluent in Python; experience with C++ or Java is a plus * Hands-on experience with modern ML frameworks (e.g., PyTorch, TensorFlow) * Knowledge of MLOps concepts and tools (e.g., MLflow, Kubeflow) * Experience in feature engineering, model design, evaluation, diagnostics, and monitoring * Analytical mindset with a problem-solving approach * Passion for solving customer challenges quickly while making thoughtful architectural decisions * Ability to communicate complex technical findings to both technical and non-technical stakeholders. * Strong written and verbal communication skills in English * M.Sc. in a relevant field is preferred * Ability and willingness to work in a hybrid capacity from our office 3 days a week WHAT WE OFFER YOU: * Inclusive Culture: Join a team of over 750 Smartlies representing more than 60 nationalities across 24 locations in 13 countries, we foster a culture built on trust, transparency, and open feedback. * Global Impact: Be part of a company making a global impact, directly influencing our customers and business growth. * Wellbeing Focus: Enjoy generous healthcare packages, mental health services, and a healthy work-life balance with paid holidays and family leave. * Total Rewards: Benefit from equity options, performance-based rewards, competitive compensation, and ample career development opportunities. * Hybrid Workplace: We work in a hybrid model, balancing office and remote work, with the option to work abroad for up to 30 days. Smartly is committed to being the best place to work for growth-minded individuals to thrive - explore more in our Culture Handbook!   #LI-OK #LI-Hybrid ABOUT SMARTLY Smartly is the AI-powered advertising technology company transforming ad experiences for brands and their consumers. Our comprehensive advertising platform seamlessly integrates the capabilities of media, creative, and intelligence to power more than 800 billion impressions and generate more than 300 billion creatives annually, delivering tangible business outcomes for brands and advertisers. Smartly is the only company in the industry recognized as a Leader in The Forrester Wave: Creative Advertising Technologies with PwC validating the results it delivers for brands. We manage creative and media for 700+ brands worldwide and $6B in ad spend across the largest media platforms, including Facebook, Google, Instagram, Pinterest, Snap, and TikTok. Our end-to-end technology, unmatched access to media platforms and exceptional customer service help Fortune 500 brands to reach and engage consumers and learn what performs best.Smartly is a multinational and diverse team of 750+ Smartlies from 60+ nationalities, working in 13 countries. Together, we want to create and maintain an inclusive environment where everyone feels respected and heard. Our Diversity, Equity & Inclusion approach is at the heart of it. Visit Smartly to learn more. The processing of your information is described in our Candidate Privacy Notice.

Toast creates technology to help restaurants and local businesses succeed in a digital world, helping business owners operate, increase sales, engage customers, and keep employees happy. Retail is Toast's biggest bet and we are growing rapidly. The opportunity is massive, and the category is ours to define. You'll have the backing of Toast's scale, brand, and resources but you'll be on the team architecting how we operate, scale, and win.  The decisions you make in this role will shape how Toast competes in retail for years to come. Toast is prioritizing AI integration across the enterprise to redefine GTM velocity. As part of this strategy, multiple business units are pursuing specialized AI initiatives tailored to market challenges. This model balances corporate-wide coordination with vertical accountability: teams work in lockstep to scale efficiencies and aggregate impact, while remaining responsible for developing, building, and launching solutions optimized for unique operating environments. The GTM Sales Engineer & AI solutions is the core functional driver of this transformation within the Retail vertical. As an expert in applied AI, you will own the centralized deployment of AI applications to directly improve Productivity Per Rep (PPR). You will drive AI-powered productivity and automation across Retail sales, working with AEs and BDR/SDR teams to accelerate sales and with Onboarding to streamline the path to Customer Go-Live, with the opportunity to grow your impact across other GTM and client-facing teams as the vertical scales. You will be the operational linchpin running the Retail AI GTM Pod, architecting a continuous feedback loop sourcing grassroots ideas from the frontline, filtering them through a business lens, and scaling them into production tools. This is a technical, builder-focused role. You will observe decentralized AI applications working across the organization and partner to accelerate their impact, making them structurally better, integrating them into core systems, and maintaining them long-term. While you will partner with central corporate operations and marketing to advocate for Retail use cases and scale company-wide efficiencies, you will also possess the autonomous engineering capabilities to construct vertical-specific pipelines when distinct merchant workflows require it. This role sits in Revenue Operations, but will also dotted-line report into engineering. A day in the life (Responsibilities)  AI GTM POD GOVERNANCE & SOLUTION SOURCING * Leadership & Facilitation: Stand up the Retail AI GTM Pod to surface, qualify, and scale AI applications across the Retail field. The model could be a working group of AI-forward reps, managers, and leaders organized around defined themes in Sales & Onboarding, contributing domain expertise and frontline signals. The pod functions as an intake mechanism and sounding board, surfacing field experiments, pressure-testing priorities, and keeping your roadmap grounded in what moves the business. * Idea & Solution Sourcing: Serve as the production engine for ideas surfacing through the pod and field. Evaluate what is worth scaling, determine the right build, buy, or borrow path, and take the strongest ideas from experiment to production tool—launching with Enablement to non-technical end-users and maintaining active ownership through adoption tracking, feedback, and iteration. * Build vs. Buy Evaluation: Lead technical discovery to determine the most efficient path for problem statements, assessing whether to build a custom agentic solution, stitch existing APIs, or coordinate with vendors to purchase a scalable product. * Roadmap Prioritization: Translate decisions into a sprint-based roadmap, prioritizing developments based strictly on their potential to drive vertical PPR and eliminate administrative friction. APPLIED ENGINEERING & SYSTEMS INTEGRATION * Agile Sprint Execution: Maintain and execute against a technical scrum board, operating on defined sprint cycles to continuously ship, test, and iterate on AI-powered features. * Industrializing Frontline Wins: Take successful, unscaled local experiments (e.g., territory expansion scoring, contact discovery pipelines, multi-intent category parsers) and harden them with error handling, version control, scalable code, and secure coding practices like input validation, secrets management, and mitigation of LLM risks (e.g., prompt injection). * Systems Integration: Coordinate integration efforts to map vertical AI outputs into core GTM platforms (Salesforce, Snowflake, Taskray), ensuring local applications enhance rather than disrupt foundational enterprise pipelines. * Data Integrity Architecture: Build & monitor data validation frameworks ensuring model inputs are pristine and outputs are entirely auditable and trusted by the field. * Application Security: Design & enforce security controls for Retail AI applications, including authentication/authorization frameworks, secrets management, access controls on model outputs, and mitigations for LLM risks (prompt injection, data exfiltration). Ensure builds meet Toast's security standards given system proximity to payment and customer data workflows. CROSS-FUNCTIONAL PARTNERSHIP & STRATEGIC RADAR * Enterprise Collaboration: Contribute to cross-functional AI coordination cadences connecting Revenue Operations, Marketing AI, and Business Technology teams across Toast. Align on company-wide AI investments, advocate for Retail use cases and merchant requirements in shared roadmaps, and identify where central efforts can be leveraged, adapted, or extended. Serve as Retail's active voice in sequencing these shared initiatives while staying coordinated. * Vertical Personalization: Monitor central enterprise tool developments (e.g., prospecting or enablement agent suites) to identify opportunities to clone, customize, or extend for Retail merchant types. * Bidirectional Knowledge Exchange: Establish a pipeline for sharing locally developed code, architecture patterns, and prompt structures with central teams, ensuring Retail's breakthroughs help elevate Toast's engineering ecosystem. FLUENCY, ENABLEMENT & TRAINING LOOPS * AI Fluency Leadership: Design and execute vertical-wide enablement tracks to build a baseline of confident, independent AI tool usage across sales reps, onboarding consultants, and managers. * Adoption Analytics: Build & monitor adoption tracking mechanisms for deployed AI solutions, ensuring training translates into consistent field usage and measurable reductions in level of effort (LOE). What you'll need to thrive (Requirements) * Applied AI Deployment: 4+ years of experience in a technical, analytical, or GTM operations role, with a track record of owning the full deployment lifecycle of applied AI applications, RAG pipelines, or agentic workflows, including post-launch monitoring, alerting, rollback procedures, and model version management. * Modern AI Toolchain Literacy: Advanced, hands-on proficiency with developer-focused AI tools, specifically the Gemini Suite, Claude Cowork, and Claude Code. * Modern Deployment Stack: Experience deploying and operating AI backend systems in production (API services, model inference pipelines, orchestration layers), with demonstrated ownership through reliability, observability, and incident response. * Application Security Awareness: Familiarity with security best practices for AI-native systems, including authentication/authorization, secrets management, access controls on outputs, and awareness of LLM attack surfaces (prompt injection, data exfiltration). * Agile Operational Fluency: Experience operating within an agile engineering model, including managing technical product backlogs, running sprint cycles, and maintaining scrum boards. * Strategic Diplomacy: Exceptional communication skills with a proven ability to enter central enterprise forums, align stakeholders, advocate for vertical needs, and collaborate across business units. What will help you stand out (Nonessential Skills/Nice to Haves) * Software engineering or computer science background with the ability to write functional code (Python, JavaScript, or equivalent) and construct robust API integrations from scratch. * Direct domain familiarity with B2B SaaS and Retail tech spanning grocery, convenience, or wholesale commerce environments. * Experience building or scaling an AI program for non-technical end-users, including driving literacy, prompt engineering, or tool enablement. * Degree in Computer Science, Engineering, a related technical discipline, or equivalent practical experience as a technical founder or builder.   AI at Toast At Toast, one of our company values is that we're hungry to build and learn. We believe learning new AI tools empowers us to build for our customers faster, more independently, and with higher quality. We provide these tools across all disciplines, from Engineering and Product to Sales and Support, and are inspired by how our Toasters are already driving real value with them. The people who thrive here are those who embrace changes that let us build more for our customers; it’s a core part of our culture.   Our Total Rewards Philosophy  We strive to provide competitive compensation and benefits programs that help to attract, retain, and motivate the best and brightest people in our industry. Our total rewards package goes beyond great earnings potential and provides the means to a healthy lifestyle with the flexibility to meet Toasters’ changing needs. Learn more about our benefits at https://careers.toasttab.com/toast-benefits. The base salary range for this role is listed below. The starting salary will be determined based on skills, experience, and geographic location. In addition to base salary, our total rewards components include cash compensation (overtime, bonus/commissions if eligible), equity, and benefits. You can learn more about how we align pay with local labor markets in our Geographic Pay Zone Philosophy. Zone A $172,000—$275,000 USD Zone B $150,000—$240,000 USD Zone C $135,000—$216,000 USD How Toast Uses AI in its Hiring Process Throughout the hiring process, our goal is to get to know you. We use AI tools to support our recruiters and interviewers with tasks like note-taking, summarization, and documentation of interviews to ensure they can be fully focused on your conversation. All hiring decisions are made by people. To learn more: https://careers.toasttab.com/ai-in-hiring Our Approach to Hybrid Working We embrace a hybrid work model that fosters in-person collaboration while valuing individual needs. Our goal is to build a strong culture of connection as we work together to empower the hospitality community, regardless of location. Please visit the Locations page on our career site to learn more about our in-office expectations by region: https://careers.toasttab.com/locations-toast Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion is Baked into our Recipe for Success At Toast, our employees are our secret ingredient—when they thrive, we thrive. The restaurant industry is one of the most diverse, and we embrace that diversity with authenticity, inclusivity, respect, and humility. By embedding these principles into our culture and design, we create equitable opportunities for all and raise the bar in delivering exceptional experiences. We Thrive Together We embrace a hybrid work model that fosters in-person collaboration while valuing individual needs. Our goal is to build a strong culture of connection as we work together to empower the restaurant community. To learn more about how we work globally and regionally, check out: https://careers.toasttab.com/locations-toast. Apply today! Toast is committed to creating an accessible and inclusive hiring process. As part of this commitment, we strive to provide reasonable accommodations for persons with disabilities to enable them to access the hiring process. If you need an accommodation to access the job application or interview process, please contact candidateaccommodations@toasttab.com. ------ For roles in the United States, it is unlawful in Massachusetts to require or administer a lie detector test as a condition of employment or continued employment. An employer who violates this law shall be subject to criminal penalties and civil liability.