ABOUT US

At Booking.com, data drives our decisions. Technology is at our core. And innovation is everywhere. But our company is more than datasets, lines of code or A/B tests. We’re the thrill of the first night in a new place. The excitement of the next morning. The friends you make. The journeys you take. The sights you see. And the food you sample. Through our products, partners, and people, we make it easier for everyone to experience the world.

ROLE DESCRIPTION

Ensuring we understand the needs and intentions of our travelers remains a top priority for Booking. With millions of accommodations, flights, taxis, attractions, and car rentals available on our platform, our aim is to assist customers in finding the perfect fit for their journey. Customers may express their needs and intentions directly through their searches or filter usage, while in addition we can further deduct their preferences from their interactions on our platform, such as clicking on specific accommodations rather than others. At Booking, we consistently analyze and model customer behavior to personalize the traveler experience.
Following successful user intent and needs modeling across various parts of the company, these efforts have recently been consolidated into a central team, and as part of the Traveler Centric Data track within the new Marketplace business unit we are now expanding further. The User Intent Modelling team is building upon past successes, while also deepening on innovation to push the boundaries for personalisation even further by leveraging state-of-the-art Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence. It is a crucial aspect of the Marketplace vision to ensure we guide our travelers to the most suitable products and facilitate seamless connections between the various parts of their trip.
As a Machine Learning Engineer, your responsibility is to operationalise cutting-edge Machine Learning models that need to run in real-time, ensuring low-latency performance to deliver an exceptional user experience for our travelers, requiring the training of large-scale models and developing scalable feature engineering solutions using modern data and Machine Learning tooling and optimization techniques. You will work closely together with the other Machine Learning Engineers and Machine Learnings Scientists in the User Intent Modelling team as well as with Data Engineers, Software Engineers and Product Managers.

KEY JOB RESPONSIBILITIES AND DUTIES

• Execute applied research plans for machine intelligence on a specific product by designing innovative ML/AI models, algorithms, and approaches that deliver both short-term commercial impact and longer-term differentiated business value and customer experiences. Document and share the findings.
• Translate specific business problems into ML/AI challenges and identify the best approach within the constraints of the production environment. Build proof-of-concepts to test new ideas and demonstrate their potential value to relevant stakeholders.
• Develop production-grade machine learning code, from models to features and pipelines, allowing for scalability, realtime, monitoring and retraining. Monitor product health, performance and business impact and act accordingly when not met.
• Build readable and reusable code, choosing the right technologies, coding methodologies, and approach from carefully designed rapid prototyping to software deployment at scale. Identify opportunities for platform-based development and reuse by abstracting business problems to generalized ML/AI solutions.
• 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.
• Identify underlying issues and opportunities across domains and situations through application of structured thinking and logic, and formulate possible improvements.
• 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 in areas where they can generate impact.
• 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 central teams.

ROLE QUALIFICATIONS AND REQUIREMENTS

• We prefer candidates with Deep Learning experience, especially when applied to large-scale datasets.
• 2 years of relevant work experience (or equivalent), involved with the application of Machine Learning to business problems in a commercial environment.
• Demonstrable experience 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
• Strong working in Spark and SQL and in one or more general purpose programming languages, including but not limited to: Java, Python or Perl.
• Bsc or higher in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Software Engineering, or related fields.
• Experience in Kubernetes and Docker.