Staff Machine Learning Engineer - Ads Bidding

Our Global Structure

Deliveroo is now part of DoorDash, bringing together teams with even greater reach, scale, and ambition. Depending on your role, you may collaborate with teammates, systems, and leaders across DoorDash and Wolt. Together, we’re unlocking new possibilities as one global team.

Staff Machine Learning Engineer – Ads Bidding

The Team

The Ads ML team builds and maintains the machine learning models powering Deliveroo's advertising product — connecting consumers with relevant ads and helping merchants, grocers, and FMCG brands grow through the platform. The UK team is ~11 MLEs across ads and promotions, and collaborates closely with the US team (meetings capped at 4pm UK to protect reasonable hours).

The Problem

Deliveroo is migrating ads from cost-per-click (CPC) to cost-per-order (CPO) — merchants pay when an ad drives an order, not when it's clicked. This is a genuinely open, cutting-edge problem: very few companies have solved it, and there's no established playbook to follow. The exact approach is under active discussion and you'd be central to driving it.

You will

Own the design and execution of the CPC-to-CPO migration, including the core open question of whether the system stays CPO-facing externally while optimising CPC behind the scenes, or some hybrid of the two

Build and improve the bidding surface: goal-based automated bidding, Target CPO, optimised CPC, and Target ROAS

Own yield management tied to ROS targeting

Partner daily with the DoorDash US team to align on approach across markets

Set technical direction for the domain

Requirements

Expertise in ad economics, marketplace bidding, or auction theory

Direct working experience with optimised CPC, target CPO, goal-based automated bidding, and target ROAS

Strong self-driven leadership baseline — you'll be setting direction in an ambiguous space, not executing against an established one

7+ years writing production code in Python; solid ML fundamentals in ranking, recommenda