Senior Machine Learning Scientist

At Booking.com, data drives our decisions, and technology and innovation are central to how we work.

We’re looking for a Senior Machine Learning Scientist I to join our Travel LLMs and Agentic team in Amsterdam.

About the team

The team is at the forefront of Generative AI innovation, driving solutions for travel-related chatbots, text generation and summarization applications, Q&A systems, and free-text search.

The team you are applying to is spearheading a research effort to develop leading LLMs, specifically designed for the travel domain and advanced agentic capabilities.

This pioneering initiative combines cutting-edge AI research with practical applications, focusing on creating tailored solutions that redefine how travelers plan, book, and experience their journeys.

Role description

As a Machine Learning Scientist, your work will focus on building, training, and deploying cutting-edge Generative AI models. This includes developing foundation models trained on Booking.com’s extensive textual data and creating fine-tuned models designed to tackle complex travel-related tasks. Your leadership will play a pivotal role in advancing the application of AI to transform the travel experience for millions of customers.

Key job responsibilities and duties

• Explore and apply state-of-the-art techniques in multimodal machine learning.
• Train innovative ML models (NLP, CV, LLM-finetuning…), build algorithms, and engineering approaches to drive business impact.
• Ensure implementation of reusable frameworks with clean and scalable code.
• Conduct data analysis with detailed metrics to evaluate model performance, label quality, and feature exploration.
• Work closely with machine learning engineers to ensure the model's latency and throughput meet product requirements and support deployment to production.
• Collaborate with multidisciplinary teams, including product managers, data scientists, analysts, developers, and UX specialists, to understand business requirements and translate them into machine learning solutions.

Role qualifications and requirements

• Advanced knowledge and experience in Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing, including engineering aspects of developing ML 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, preferably evidenced by peer-reviewed publication, patents, open sourced code, or similar work.
• Relevant work or academic experience (MSc + 6 years of working experience, or PhD + 4 years of working experience) involving the application of Machine Learning to business problems.
• 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 facets, including large data sets, model development, statistics, experimentation, data visualization, optimization, and software development.
• Experience collaborating cross-functionally in the development of machine learning products.
• Strong working knowledge of Python, Java, Kafka, Hadoop, SQL, and Spark or similar technologies, along with version control systems.
• Excellent English communication skills, both written and verbal.
• Experience driving technical, business, and people-related initiatives that improve productivity, performance, and quality while communicating with stakeholders at all levels.
• Leading by example, gaining respect through actions rather than title, developing team members, motivating them to achieve their goals, providing timely feedback, and managing key team performance indicators.

Benefits & Perks

• Contribute to a high-scale, sophisticated, world-class product and see the real-time impact of your work on millions of travelers worldwide.
• Be part of a truly international, fast-paced environment and performance-driven culture.
• Performance-based company that offers career advancement and lucrative compensation, including bonuses and stock potential.
• Discount on Booking.com accommodations with the “Booking Deal” including other perks and benefits.
• Company-sponsored family and social activities to help employees become integrated with each other and the company culture.
• Diverse and creative colleagues from every corner of the world.
• Health, life, and disability insurance.
• 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 for yourself, friends, and family, including automatic Genius Level 3 status and quarterly Booking.com wallet credit.
• Free access to online learning platforms, development and mentorship programs, and a complimentary Headspace membership.