Machine Learning Scientist

at  Hostelworld Group

ABOUT US

Hostelworld Group, the global hostel-focussed online booking platform, inspires adventurous minds to meet the world and come back with life-changing stories to tell. Our customers are not your average tourists, they crave cultural connection and unique experiences that we make possible by providing an unbeatable selection of hostels in unmissable locations – all in the palm of their hand.
It is the social nature and community feel of hostels and their environment, that enable travellers to embrace journeys of discovery, adventure and meaning. We have more than 13 million reviews across 17,800 hostels in more than 179 countries, making the brand the leading online hub for social travel. The website operates in 19 different languages and our mobile app in 13 languages.
Founded in 1999 and headquartered in Dublin, Hostelworld has a growing, high-calibre team of 230 people within Technology, Product, Global Markets, HR, Finance & Legal and Marketing Teams across our Dublin, London, Porto, Shanghai and Sydney offices. Hostelworld is listed on the London Stock Exchange and Dublin Euronext. You can read more about our story here.

THE ROLE & THE TEAM‍‍

During 2020, Hostelworld pivoted from a more traditional functional CMO/CPO/CTO organisation to a ‘full ownership” growth team plus platform team model. More specifically, we established four growth teams to cover all consumer /hostel facing Apps and channels that reported into the CPO; and a separate CTO organisation that became responsible for supplying and maintaining common core services (such as inventory pricing, availability and checkout) via APIs to these four growth teams. Each of these four growth teams comprise resources that report into the CPO and dedicated resources drawn from the engineering function (developers, QA resources) and analytics function. Collectively, these four growth teams comprise ~ 50 headcount and are wholly accountable for their KPIs and roadmaps

We currently have four growth teams and four further central/support teams as follows;

• Paid performance team : responsible for growing and optimising our paid web channels, including (web) landing page optimisation
• Core team : responsible for our progressive web app (PWA Website), our organic web channels such as SEO, and more generally our core OTA funnel performance
• Mobile/Social team : responsible for our iOS and Android Apps, including paid and organic downloads, CRM strategy and more generally our social network and event management (LinkUps) platforms
• Supply team : responsible for all our hostel facing platforms and tools, supporting our two sided marketplace through collaboration with our customer facing teams and leading on our inventory, availability and rates position[LR1]
• Product Design (Central) team : responsible for defining and implementing a uniform User Interface/Experience design language across our consumer and supplier facing Apps, consistent with our Mission and Brand
• Content and Creative (Central) team : responsible for defining and leading the creative direction for Hostelworld, delivering content primarily through the four Growth teams above but also supporting the wider business needs with copywriting, content writing, graphic design and video production assets
• Product and Technology Operations (Central) team : primarily responsible for driving alignment and coordination across the Growth and Technology teams quarterly roadmap planning process; and managing vendor spend across these two teams which accounts for the vast majority of non Wages and Salaries expenditure across the company
• Customer Service (Support) team : responsible for handling all consumer support queries, mostly via webform/chat and email across 19 languages.