Director, Data Science

At Chewy, we believe great work starts with great people. Our mission is to be the most trusted and convenient destination for pet parents and partners everywhere. Advertising is a core growth engine for Chewy—and science is how we make it smarter for shoppers, brands, and the business. Your Opportunity We are hiring a Director, Data Science to own and lead all Ads Data Science for Chewy—fully accountable for the science strategy and production implementation behind Chewy’s onsite and offsite Chewy Ads. You will lead a team of data scientists building the intelligence layer across the full advertising marketplace: (a) Supply-side algorithms — search, relevance, ranking, real-time bidding, bid-boosting, premium positioning, and dynamic auctions. (b) Demand-side algorithms — budgeting, pacing, budget allocation/reallocation, keyword recommendations, bid recommendations, campaign setup and auto-optimization, and advertiser ROAS optimization. (c) Portfolio management — orchestrating Chewy’s onsite and offsite Ads portfolio for optimal, balanced performance across shopper experience, advertiser outcomes, and Chewy revenue. This is a rare seat: you will define how modern AI—LLMs, generative AI, foundation models, and multimodal systems—shows up in a real advertising marketplace, not as demos, but as durable production systems that move customer and advertiser outcomes at scale. As a core member of Ads leadership, you’ll partner closely with Product, Engineering, and business partners, and represent Ads science to Chewy senior leadership. What You’ll Own Full ownership of Chewy Ads Data Science across onsite and offsite channels—strategy, roadmap, model portfolio, delivery, and scientific quality bar. Lead, grow, and mentor a high-performing team of data scientists; set standards for modeling, experimentation, MLOps, and research-to-production excellence. Advance state-of-the-art applied science across the three pillars above: embeddings and representation learning, CTR/CVR prediction, multi-objective ranking, auction and bidding dynamics, budget optimization, ROAS optimization, causal measurement, and marketplace balance. Define and execute Chewy Ads’ AI / GenAI strategy, including LLM-powered workstreams such as: Generative creative and offer assistance Intelligent keyword and query recommendation Bid recommendation and automated bidding guidance Auto-campaign setup and optimization copilots for advertisers Retrieval-augmented systems for relevance, discovery, and ranking quality Partner with Product and Engineering to ship production systems that improve shopper relevance, advertiser ROI/ROAS, and Ads business performance. Establish rigorous experimentation and decision frameworks so science investments map clearly to customer and revenue impact. Represent Ads science to senior leadership—translating complex work into clear strategy, tradeoffs, and recommendations. Raise Chewy’s external scientific presence through publications, talks, and recruiting at leading ML/AI/advertising venues (encouraged, not required). What You’ll Need Advanced degree (M.S., PhD, or equivalent experience) in a quantitative field (e.g., CS, ML, Statistics, OR, Applied Math, Data Science), or 10+ years building and leading large-scale ML/optimization systems. Proven experience leading data scientists / applied scientists and owning end-to-end science delivery in production—ideally in ads, search, recommendations, personalization, or marketplace systems. Deep hands-on fluency with modern ML for ranking and prediction at scale: deep learning, embeddings, retrieval, multi-objective optimization, and online experimentation. Experience with advertising optimization systems spanning supply and demand—auctions, real-time bidding, pacing, budget allocation, keyword/bid recommendations, auto-campaign optimization, and ROAS optimization under real-time, constrained-spend settings. Demonstrated experience