Senior ML Engineer — travel recommendations

Booking.com is hiring a Senior Senior ML Engineer — travel recommendations on the Personalization team (Hybrid · Amsterdam, Netherlands). This is a hands-on role in search & recommendations—not a generic “AI enthusiast” post.

You will own ranking, retrieval, and online experimentation end to end: problem framing, offline evaluation, safe rollout, and iteration from production signals. Success is measured with clear metrics (quality, latency, cost, or business KPIs)—not slide decks alone.

Booking.com — Senior ML Engineer — travel recommendations. Apply on Ganloss with a clear profile and optional cover note.

Booking.com needs someone who can move ranking, retrieval, and online experimentation from experiment to production—with tests, monitoring, and stakeholder-ready communication.

The Personalization group partners closely with product and domain experts; you will translate ambiguous requirements into measurable ML or LLM outcomes.

What you will do

• Design and ship ranking, retrieval, and online experimentation with offline evals, dashboards, and rollback plans.
• Improve datasets, labeling, and metrics that correlate with user or business outcomes.
• Review model changes for safety, bias, latency, and infrastructure cost before wide release.
• Document decisions so on-call, support, and compliance teams can act without guesswork.
• Join design reviews and pairing sessions with engineers and domain experts.

What we look for

• Demonstrated production use of core skills such as Python, PyTorch, SQL—with repos, writeups, or metrics we can verify.
• Comfort operating the listed toolchain (Spark) in real environments—not tutorials only.
• Ownership of at least one feature or model from design through post-launch review—including failure modes you handled.
• Clear communication on trade-offs (quality, cost, latency, safety) with product and non-technical stakeholders.
• Eligible to work in Netherlands (or remote policy as stated in the listing).

Benefits & ways of working

• Relocation support, hybrid, global travel data.