Senior Machine Learning Scientist

Details

At Booking.com, data drives decisions, technology is at the core of the business, and innovation is widespread. This opening is within the GenAI Applications Team in the Data & AI Marketplace department.

The team designs and delivers agentic, machine-learning-powered solutions for impactful products, including booking search experiences, trip planning, and trip helpfulness. It builds AI-driven applications and conversational agents, such as chatbots and intelligent assistants, to enhance the end-to-end customer experience.

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and evaluate machine learning solutions for scalable, customer-facing Generative AI applications.
• Research, train, fine-tune, and rigorously evaluate models using LLMs, recommendation systems, and agent-based architectures.
• Explore and apply state-of-the-art techniques in multimodal machine learning.
• Train innovative machine learning models involving NLP, computer vision, and LLM fine-tuning.
• Build algorithms and engineering approaches that drive business impact.
• Implement reusable frameworks using clean and scalable code.
• Conduct data analysis using detailed metrics to evaluate model performance, label quality, and feature exploration.
• Work with machine learning engineers to ensure model latency and throughput meet product requirements and to deploy models to production.
• Collaborate with product managers, data scientists, analysts, developers, and UX specialists to understand business requirements and translate them into machine learning solutions.
• Define success metrics, drive experimentation, and translate insights into impactful AI solutions.
• Lead technical, business, and people-related initiatives that improve productivity, performance, and quality.
• Develop and motivate team members, provide timely feedback, and manage key team performance indicators.

Requirements

• Advanced knowledge and experience in computer vision, natural language processing, and the engineering aspects of developing machine learning and Generative AI models at scale.
• Experience designing and executing end-to-end research and development plans and generating impact through large-scale machine learning model development. Peer-reviewed publications, patents, open-source code, or similar evidence are preferred.
• A relevant MSc with at least 3 years of work experience, or a PhD with at least 2 years of work experience, applying machine learning to business problems.
• A master's degree, PhD, or equivalent experience in a quantitative field such as computer science, engineering mathematics, artificial intelligence, or physics.
• Experience across multiple machine learning areas, including large datasets, model development, statistics, experimentation, data visualization, optimization, and software development.
• Experience collaborating cross-functionally to develop machine learning products.
• Strong working knowledge of Python, Java, Kafka, Hadoop, SQL, and Spark or similar technologies.
• Experience with version control systems.
• Excellent written and verbal English communication skills.
• Ability to communicate with stakeholders at all levels and lead by example.