Senior Data Scientist

Role Description

About Us: At Booking.com, data drives our decisions. Technology is at our core. Through our products, partners and people, we make it easier for everyone to experience the world.

About the team: The Digital Media Analytics team in Growth Marketing unites analysts, data scientists, and engineers to measure, report, and optimize paid media across channels like YouTube, Facebook, and Criteo using an incrementality-first approach with holdout/control tests. They translate causal results into automated pipelines and clear dashboards for daily decisions, and run an experimentation program that standardizes hypotheses, KPIs, power/duration, and effort scoring for transparent planning and robust readouts.

Role description: As a Senior Data Scientist in the Digital Media Analytics Team, you focus on scalable solutions and frameworks to the company’s most persistent challenges in decision making. You provide support to experimenters and business leaders across the company, investigate problems and define clear solutions and requirements for their implementation. You will build proofs of concept and prototypes, and work closely with the engineering teams to support our product vision. The ability to write high quality, reproducible code, dig into technical product details for feasible and robust solutions is crucial to make your work impactfully landed in the Experimentation Tool, and enable solid decision making adoptable by a wide range of experimenters and leadership.

Senior Data Scientists define the strategy and vision in the area, driving them from ideation to full productionisation. They autonomously prioritize and solve impactful strategic business problems using suitable data analysis and modeling methods. Senior Data Scientists handle key projects within their team, delivering work that influences business decisions across multiple products. They design and interpret quantitative experiments, driving long-term strategic business decisions. They independently manage a range of stakeholders, including senior managers and director roles, and maintain effective communication. As subject matter experts in a specific area of data science, they play a vital role as a go-to authority for senior business stakeholders, influence business decisions within their wider area, and contribute significantly to the community through coaching, mentoring, and community projects.

Key Job Responsibilities and Duties

• Define the strategy and vision for generating impact in the department by leveraging data science solutions and driving them from ideation to prototyping to full productionisation.
• Proactively identify and autonomously prioritize impactful strategic business problems, translate them into data stories, and solve them effectively by applying suitable statistical data analysis and modeling methods. Leverage input from product stakeholders to determine the right technical solutions to deliver customer value.
• Design and interpret quantitative experiments to objectively drive long-term strategic business decision making.
• Autonomously identify and manage a broad range of stakeholders, from operational team members to directors. Maintain effective communication, address stakeholder needs, and convey complex analysis results clearly.
• Explore and modify existing internal and external data science approaches. Make these solutions reusable by designing for easy adoption and proactively educating and upskilling peers on how to effectively utilize these solutions in their work.
• Incorporate scalability, reproducibility and long-term orientation in the work, and regularly share best practices with peers.
• Act as a force multiplier for peers by actively helping them with their craft through coaching, mentoring and setting a good example.
• Contribute significantly to the community by implementing ways to make other data professionals more effective, actively participating in community strengthening activities, and connecting the area to the rest of the business.
• Proactively collaborate with peers in related crafts such as Data Engineering on all projects owned by the team, anticipating data needs to maintain smooth execution of projects.
• Maintain significant deep knowledge about the operational, tactical and strategic goals of the area and be knowledgeable of the goals of the wider area.

Role qualifications and requirements

• A minimum of 8 years of professional experience as a Data Scientist, preferably in software, product or e-commerce environments
• Fluent in Pyspark and general Python
• Strong working knowledge of statistical and hypothesis testing
• Strong commercial awareness with an ability to understand the business implications of a certain solution while being able to communicate that to stakeholders from various levels
• Experience working closely with product teams, including developers and engineers
• Willingness to dig deep into problems and behind-the-scenes data to support troubleshooting and bug fixing
• Solution oriented and result driven, with a strong bias for action instead of perfect solutions and willingness to work on the most pressing challenges even when they don’t sound advanced enough
• Able to brainstorm, peer review and drive research topics that benefit Experimentation and Decision Making in both the short and long term
• Excellent English communication skills, both written and verbal, with the ability to convey your message to team members and other stakeholders clearly and gently
• Achieve impact as a team player, and maintain solid relationships with technical and non-technical stakeholders
• Understand the complexity of experimentation from both craft and product perspectives, and how to effectively drive scalable solutions for continuous improvements

The following skills are assets for this role:

• Knowledge of the statistical properties of good metrics, and ability to scalably test them
• Causal inference knowledge beyond A/B testing
• Ability to understand scripts written in R
• Experience building libraries or modules in Python
• Familiarity with APIs
• Good understanding of fundamental machine learning concepts
• Strong knowledge of reporting and visualization techniques such as Tableau, Graphite, and Power BI
• The role may at times require reporting and dashboarding

Benefits & Perks - Global Impact, Personal Relevance:

• Annual paid time off and generous paid leave scheme including parent, grandparent, bereavement, and care leave
• Hybrid working including flexible working arrangements, and up to 20 days per year working from abroad in your home country
• Industry leading product discounts of up to 1400 per year for yourself, including automatic Genius Level 3 status and Booking.com wallet credit
• Living and working in Amsterdam, one of the most cosmopolitan cities in Europe
• Contributing to a high-scale, complex, world-renowned product and seeing real-time impact of your work on millions of travelers worldwide
• Working in a fast-paced and performance-driven culture
• Opportunity to utilize technical expertise, leadership capabilities and entrepreneurial spirit
• Promote and drive impactful and innovative engineering solutions
• Technical, behavioral and interpersonal competence advancement via on-the-job opportunities, experimental projects, hackathons, conferences and active community participation
• Competitive compensation and benefits package and some great added perks of working in the home city of Booking.com