Senior Machine Learning Scientist I - Performance Marketing

Role Description

At Booking.com, data drives decisions, technology is at the core, and innovation is everywhere.

About the team:

The Performance Marketing team builds and optimizes large-scale ML systems for online bidding across all major search providers, owning one of the industry’s largest online advertising optimization platforms to keep Booking.com competitive. The team runs end-to-end research-to-production cycles—from POC models to production A/B tests—driving measurable impact by innovating in online auctions at scale.

As a Senior Machine Learning Scientist, you’ll work on diverse marketing surfaces and play an integral role in advancing bidding algorithms across verticals. You’ll collaborate closely with machine learning scientists, scientists, engineers, developers, and business stakeholders, taking full ownership of your work from initial idea generation through implementation of the final machine learning product. You will thrive at Booking.com if you are result-focused, innovative, and have a solid quantitative background, with a strong understanding of complex business problems and a customer-centric approach to solving them.

Key Job Responsibilities and Duties:

• Develop the strategy and execution plan for implementing company-wide ML Systems Quality improvement programs.
• Collect, assess and develop good practices for ML Systems across the company.
• Identify opportunities to improve our Machine Learning Systems Development Processes.
• Translate quality related ideas into actionable capabilities and safeguards for our Machine Learning Platform.
• Independently define and build proof-of-concepts to test new ideas and demonstrate their potential value to relevant stakeholders.
• Build readable and reusable code, choosing the right technologies, coding methodologies, and approach from carefully designed rapid prototyping to software deployment at scale.
• Maintain a highly cross-disciplinary perspective, solving issues by applying approaches and methods from across a variety of ML/AI disciplines and related fields. Coach others through evidence and clear communication, explaining advanced technical concepts in simpler terms.
• Identify underlying issues and opportunities across domains and situations through application of structured thinking and logic, and drive concrete improvements. Guide and support colleagues dealing with complex scenarios.
• Continuously evolve your craft by keeping up to date with the latest developments in ML/AI and related technologies, introducing them to the machine learning community and promoting their application.
• Actively contribute to Machine Learning at Booking.com through training, exploration of new technologies, interviewing, onboarding and mentoring colleagues.
• Push for improvements, scaling and extending machine learning tooling and infrastructure, collaborating with business specific teams.

Role qualifications and Requirements:

• Ability to design an applied research plan for a product family from scratch as evidenced by peer-review publication or similar track record.
• Strong relevant work or academic experience (MSc + 5 years of working experience, or PhD + 2 years), involved in the development and application of Machine Learning.
• Masters degree, PhD or equivalent experience in a quantitative field (e.g. Computer Science, Mathematics, Artificial Intelligence, Physics, etc).
• Experience on multiple machine learning facets: working with large data sets, model development, statistics, experimentation, data visualization, optimization, software development.
• Experience collaborating cross functionally in the development of machine learning products (e.g. Developers, ML Engineers, Product Managers, etc).
• Strong working knowledge of Python, Hadoop, SQL, Spark or similar big data technologies.
• Prior experience with Feature Engineering
• Prior experience in the Fraud domain is a plus.
• Fluency in at least one programming language, with a strong preference for Python.
• Excellent English communication skills, both written and verbal; the ability to convey your message to team members and other stakeholders.

Benefits & Perks - Global Impact, Personal Relevance:

Booking.com’s Total Rewards Philosophy is not only about compensation but also about benefits. We offer a competitive compensation and benefits package, as well unique-to-Booking.com benefits which include:

• 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 some great added perks of working in the home city of Booking.com