Data Engineer II - Content Intelligence (ML)

Role Description

At Booking.com, data drives decisions and technology is at the core of the business. This opening is for the Content Intelligence team within the Marketplace Business Unit.

Team overview:

The Content Intelligence 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 is also building a cutting-edge platform that processes millions of images and textual inputs daily, enriching them with ML capabilities. These enriched datasets power downstream applications, helping personalize the customer experience—for example, selecting and displaying the most relevant images and reviews as customers plan and book their next vacation.

Role Description:

As a Data Engineer, you’ll collaborate with engineers and data scientists to elevate the platform and deliver exceptional user experiences. Your primary focus will be on the data engineering aspects—ensuring the seamless flow of high-quality, relevant data to train and optimize content models, including GenAI foundation models, supervised fine-tuning, and more.

You’ll work closely with teams across the company to ensure the availability of high-quality data from ML platforms, powering decisions across departments. With access to petabytes of data through MySQL, Snowflake, Cassandra, S3, and other platforms, your challenge will be to ensure that this data is applied effectively to support business decisions, train and monitor ML models, and improve products.

Key Job Responsibilities and Duties:

• Rapidly developing next-generation scalable, flexible, and high-performance data pipelines.
• Dealing with massive textual sources to train GenAI foundation models.
• Solving issues with data and data pipelines, prioritizing based on customer impact.
• End-to-end ownership of data quality in core datasets and data pipelines.
• Experimenting with new tools and technologies to meet business requirements regarding performance, scaling, and data quality.
• Providing tools that improve data quality company-wide, specifically for ML scientists.
• Providing self-organizing tools that help the analytics community discover data, assess quality, explore usage, and find peers with relevant expertise.
• Acting as an intermediary for problems, with both technical and non-technical audiences.
• 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.
• Collaborate with multidisciplinary teams including product managers, data scientists, and analysts to understand business requirements and translate them into machine learning solutions. Provide technical guidance and mentorship to junior team members.

Qualifications & Skills:

• Bachelor’s or master’s degree in computer science or engineering.
• Minimum of 3 years of experience as a Data Engineer or a similar role, with a consistent record of successfully delivering ML/Data solutions.
• You have built production data pipelines in the cloud, setting up data-lake and server-less solutions, specifically to support building ML models.
• Required hands-on experience with schema design and data modeling and working with ML scientists and ML engineers to provide production level ML solutions.
• You have experience designing systems end-to-end and knowledge of basic concepts such as load balancing, databases, caching, and NoSQL.
• Strong programming skills in languages such as Python and Java.
• Experience with big data processing frameworks such as PySpark, Apache Flink, Snowflake, or similar frameworks.
• Demonstrable experience with MySQL, Cassandra, DynamoDB, or similar relational/NoSQL database systems.
• Experience with data warehousing and ETL/ELT pipelines.
• Experience in data processing for large-scale language models like GPT, BERT, or similar architectures is an advantage.
• Proficiency in data manipulation, analysis, and visualization using tools like NumPy, pandas, and matplotlib is an advantage.
• Experience with experimental design, A/B testing, and evaluation metrics for ML models is an advantage.
• Experience of working on products that impact a large customer base is an advantage.
• Excellent communication in English, written and spoken.

Benefits & Perks - Global Impact, Personal Relevance:

Booking.com’s Total Rewards Philosophy is not only about compensation but also about benefits. The company offers a competitive compensation and benefits package, as well as 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 of up to 1400 per year for yourself, including automatic Genius Level 3 status and Booking.com wallet credit.