Machine Learning Engineer I - Traveler Intelligence

About Us:

At Booking.com, data drives our decisions. Technology is at our core. And innovation is everywhere.

Role Description

As a Machine Learning Engineer (MLE I) in Traveler Intelligence at Booking.com, you contribute significantly to ML projects, taking ownership of tasks and driving them to completion. You are expected to work independently and proactively, leveraging your technical expertise to solve complex problems while collaborating closely with your team. You focus on technical execution and continuous learning, contributing to our engineering culture by sharing knowledge and insights.

Understanding travelers is a top priority at Booking.com. With millions of accommodations, flights, taxis, attractions, and car rentals available on the platform, the team helps people around the world find the best options for their journeys. Achieving this requires a deep understanding of traveler preferences, including those explicitly expressed through searches and filters, as well as those inferred from behavioral signals such as clicks and bookings. It also requires accurately interpreting traveler intent: why they are on the platform right now, whether they are exploring options or close to making a decision, whether they are continuing a previous session on another device, and whether they are extending an existing trip as part of a Connected Trip or starting an entirely new one.

The Traveler Intelligence track, part of Booking.com’s Marketplace organization, develops the core capabilities that make personalization at scale possible. It brings together traveler data and behavioral signals into a unified, real-time understanding of each traveler, enabling every product surface and AI-driven interaction to become more relevant and timely. By applying advanced Data & AI techniques to interpret behavior and uncover intent, the track helps deliver more personalized, seamless, end-to-end experiences across the entire Booking platform.

Key Job Responsibilities and Duties:

• Develop production-grade ML systems, from models to features and pipelines, accounting for reliability, scalability, real-time requirements, monitoring and retraining.
• Build readable and reusable code, applying code quality best practices and using standard libraries. Choose the right technology or coding methodology as well as refactor and simplify code when necessary.
• Take full ownership of your services end to end by actively monitoring the systems health, performance and business impact.
• Be responsible for business related data governance processes, the technical implementation and maintenance of data processing services and storage systems, and the implementation and maintenance of ML governance processes.
• Evaluate possible architecture solutions taking into account the business and technology requirements.
• Set the relevant service level objectives SLOs and act accordingly when they are not met.
• Continuously evolve your craft by keeping up to date with the latest developments in ML/AI and related technologies and upskilling on these, as needed.
• Contribute to the internal ML/AI community by sharing your knowledge and participating in internal ML programs.
• Coach others through evidence and clear communication, explaining advanced technical concepts in simpler terms.
• Maintain a highly cross-disciplinary perspective, solving issues by applying approaches and methods from across a variety of disciplines and related fields.
• Achieve mutually agreeable solutions by staying adaptable, communicating ideas in clear coherent language and practicing active listening.

Qualifications & Skills:

• 2+ years of relevant work experience (or equivalent), involved with the application of Machine Learning to business problems in a commercial environment.
• Experience in areas such as Recommender Systems, Deep Learning, Information Retrieval, Computer Vision, Speech Recognition, Causal Inference, MLOps, or related fields.
• Knowledge of multiple machine learning facets, such as working with large data sets, experimentation, scalability and optimization.
• Experience with data-driven product development: analytics, A/B testing, etc.
• Strong working experience in one or more general purpose programming languages; experience with Python and Spark.
• Experience of version control systems.
• Excellent English communication skills, both written and verbal.

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 (home country).
• Industry leading product discounts - 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 added perks of working in the home city of Booking.com.