Machine Learning Manager - Personalisation ML

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.

Staying the leader in accommodations is a top priority for Booking. The market represents a large share of business already, and yet is one of the markets with the most untapped opportunities.

One of these opportunities is to make our user experience personalised, relevant, and scalable. This involves exploring new UX paradigms, ensuring that we show the right products for our users at every stage of their journey, and personalising using Machine Learning and allied data products. As a Machine Learning Manager within the Personalisation ML team, you will be responsible for creating the ML foundations that are in the core of personalisation capabilities.

B. Responsible

As a Machine Learning Manager, you are responsible for an engineering team and the technology that the team owns. You will not only work as a coach for your people but also as a technical leader, ensuring that the right technical decisions are made when building our product.

Important aspects of the job include:

• People Leadership

• Build a strong team within their area, by coaching and developing individual contributors

• Lead by example by taking ownership, being proactive and collaborating

• Nurture, grow and develop ML talent in the team

• Foster a great culture that innovates, work together as a team, partner with other Booking.com com teams and roles and celebrates unified success

• Technology, Craft & Delivery

• Translate business problems into viable, reliable and robust ML and AI solutions, accounting for constraints of the production environment.

• Monitor product health, performance and business impact and act accordingly when requirements are not met.

• Actively contribute to Machine Learning at Booking.com through training, exploration of new technologies, interviewing, onboarding and mentoring colleagues.

• Adhere to the default principles for Architecture, quality and non-functional requirements

• Drive a culture of ownership and technical excellence, including reactive work such as incident escalations

• Architecture & Product Strategy

• Thought partner for Product to define, shape and deliver the roadmap

• Build new products, processes and operational plans

• Negotiate on the strategic importance of own product roadmap features

• Drive innovation in own team

• Own the architecture across own team

B. Skilled

We have found that people who match the following requirements are the ones who fit us best:

• Advanced knowledge and experience in areas like e.g. Recommender Systems, Online Machine Learning, Information Retrieval, Multi Armed Bandits, Causal Inference and Scaling ML models serving and training

• 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 the like.

• Relevant work experience (MSc + 5 years of working experience), involved in the application of Machine Learning to business problems.

• 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, UX specialists, Product Managers, etc.).

• Strong working knowledge of Python, Java, Kafka, Hadoop, SQL, and Spark or similar technologies. Working experience with version control systems.

• Excellent English communication skills, both written and verbal.

• 3+ years leading an ML team of a minimum of 4 people in a fast-paced production environment.

• Successfully 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, not your title. Developing your team and motivating them to achieve their goals. Providing feedback timely and managing your key team performance indicators

B. Offered

• 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 travellers 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, behavioural 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

Booking.com is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and is an affirmative action employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, colour, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, disability, age, or veteran status. We strive to move well beyond traditional equal opportunity and work to create an environment that allows everyone to thrive.