Data Scientist, Ads and Demand Optimization (Contract)

About the role

Grab is looking for a Data Scientist to join its Demand and Personalization Data Science team, which builds ranking, recommendation and algorithmic incentive systems used across Southeast Asia. The role develops, deploys and operates production-grade ranking and recommendation models, reporting to the Data Science Manager II. It is a full-time 24-month contract position, onsite at the Grab One-North Singapore office.

Key responsibilities

• Design, optimize and maintain training-data and feature extraction pipelines across regional markets, including on-call rotations.
• Build and validate user and merchant personalization signals to improve discovery relevance, CTR and conversion.
• Run online A/B experiments and monitor holdout groups to measure business and user impact.
• Work with Engineering to deploy real-time recommendation services and automated incentive allocation systems within strict SLAs and latency budgets.
• Manage production ML operations, including automated retraining, feature backfills, telemetry and drift monitoring.
• Use GenAI coding tools to speed up model prototyping and automate data scripts.

Required profile

• At least 1 year of hands-on experience as a Data Scientist or Machine Learning Engineer focused on ranking, recommendation or search, or an advanced degree in a related field with relevant internship experience.
• Demonstrated experience with learning-to-rank, CTR/CVR prediction, relevance modelling or two-tower retrieval (e.g. GBDT, deep ranking).
• Experience with offline ranking metrics (NDCG, MRR, AUC, MAP) and designing and analysing online A/B tests.
• Practical understanding of deploying ML models in production and monitoring pipeline health.

Required skills

• Python and SQL, with at least 1 year building production pipelines using Apache Spark and Airflow.
• Experience with AI tools and emerging technologies to improve productivity.

What we offer

• Term life insurance and medical insurance.
• Parental and birthday leave, plus volunteering leave.
• A confidential assistance programme.
• FlexWork arrangements such as differentiated hours.