Senior Machine Learning Scientist - Personalization

Expedia Group brands power global travel for everyone, everywhere. We design cutting-edge tech to make travel smoother and more memorable, and we create groundbreaking solutions for our partners. Our diverse, vibrant, and welcoming community is essential in driving our success. Why Join Us?To shape the future of travel, people must come first. Guided by our Values and Leadership Agreements, we foster an open culture where everyone belongs, differences are celebrated and know that when one of us wins, we all win. We provide a full benefits package, including exciting travel perks, generous time-off, parental leave, a flexible work model (with some pretty cool offices), and career development resources, all to fuel our employees' passion for travel and ensure a rewarding career journey. We’re building a more open world. Join us. Senior Machine Learning Scientist – Personalization Introduction to the team The Unified Personalization Service team is part of Expedia Product & Technology. UPS is building Expedia Group's centralized, real-time personalization engine across brands and channels, powering ranking, recommendations, retrieval, and other adaptive experiences that help travelers see more relevant, contextual, and useful experiences throughout their journey. We are looking for a Senior Machine Learning Scientist to help shape the next generation of deep learning systems for personalization, including recommendation, ranking, retrieval, traveler understanding, sequential modeling, and foundation-model-based personalization. This is a senior hands-on applied science and engineering role for someone who can translate recent research into production-quality systems, influence technical direction, raise the modeling bar for the team, and mentor other scientists. In this role, you will:

• Design, develop, and apply machine learning solutions to real-world personalization, product, and business problems, translating ambiguous opportunities into scalable models, experiments, and production-ready capabilities
• Drive end-to-end scientific work across problem formulation, data exploration, feature engineering, model development, evaluation, and iteration, with strong attention to measurable impact
• Partner closely with engineers, product, and business stakeholders to integrate machine learning solutions into services and workflows, including system design, API design, and data modeling considerations where applicable
• Use strong technical judgment to select appropriate methods, validate outcomes, and improve model performance, reliability, and operational quality across multiple problem domains
• Safely integrate and operate AI/ML-enabled solutions that improve outcomes, including familiarity with AI-driven systems, tools, or workflows and applying AI/ML concepts to real world products
• Contribute deep technical expertise across related domains, helping raise scientific and engineering quality through experimentation, documentation, mentoring, and reusable approaches that support broader team effectiveness

Minimum Qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related technical field; or Equivalent related professional experience
• 8+ years of relevant professional experience
• Demonstrated ownership of machine learning solutions at the service or multi-service level, including problem definition, model development, evaluation, and operationalization within a product or technical domain
• Strong foundation in machine learning methods, statistical analysis, experimentation, and data-driven decision making, with hands-on coding experience in scientific and production-oriented environments
• Experience working with cross-functional partners to deploy technical solutions, with core expectations in scalable model development, data modeling, and integration into software systems

Preferred Qualifications:

• Advanced degree in Machine Learning, Computer Science, Statistics, Mathematics, Engineering, or a related quantitative field
• Experience delivering machine learning solutions at scale, including architecture considerations, production monitoring, model lifecycle management, and operational excellence in live environments
• Demonstrated ability to influence technical direction within a domain through rigorous experimentation, strong scientific reasoning, pragmatic solution design, and clear communication with cross-functional partners
• Strong experience with recommendation, ranking, retrieval, search, personalization, ads, marketplace, e-commerce, or similarly complex applied ML systems
• Experience with neural recommendation systems, sequential or session-based recommendation, transformer-based recommenders, semantic retrieval, generative retrieval, or representation learning at scale
• Experience with foundation models, LLMs, embedding models, semantic IDs, hybrid LLM-recommender systems, two-stage retrieval and ranking systems, or retrieval-augmented personalization workflows
• Relevant academic publications, patents, open-source contributions, technical blog posts, industry talks, or other contributions to the ML/recommender-systems community

The total cash range for this position in San Jose is $187,000.00 to $261,500.00. Employees in this role have the potential to increase their pay up to $299,000.00, which is the top of the range, based on ongoing, demonstrated, and sustained performance in the role. The total cash range for this position in Seattle is $173,000.00 to $242,500.00. Employees in this role have the potential to increase their pay up to $277,000.00, which is the top of the range, based on ongoing, demonstrated, and sustained performance in the role. Starting pay for this role will vary based on multiple factors, including location, available budget, and an individual’s knowledge, skills, and experience. Pay ranges may be modified in the future. Expedia Group is proud to offer a wide range of benefits to support employees and their families, including medical/dental/vision, paid time off, and an Employee Assistance Program. To fuel each employee’s passion for travel, we offer a wellness & travel reimbursement, travel discounts, and an International Airlines Travel Agent (IATAN) membership. View our full list of benefits. Accommodation requests If you need assistance with any part of the application or recruiting process due to a disability, or other physical or mental health conditions, please reach out to our Recruiting Accommodations Team through the Accommodation Request. We are proud to be named as a Best Place to Work on Glassdoor in 2024 and be recognized for award-winning culture by organizations like Forbes, TIME, Disability:IN, and others. Expedia Group's family of brands includes: Brand Expedia®, Hotels.com®, Expedia® Partner Solutions, Vrbo®, trivago®, Orbitz®, Travelocity®, Hotwire®, Wotif®, ebookers®, CheapTickets®, Expedia Group™ Media Solutions, Expedia Local Expert®, CarRentals.com™, and Expedia Cruises™. © 2024 Expedia, Inc. All rights reserved. Trademarks and logos are the property of their respective owners. CST: 2029030-50 Employment opportunities and job offers at Expedia Group will always come from Expedia Group’s Talent Acquisition and hiring teams. Never provide sensitive, personal information to someone unless you’re confident who the recipient is. Expedia Group does not extend job offers via email or any other messaging tools to individuals with whom we have not made prior contact. Our email domain is @expediagroup.com. The official website to find and apply for job openings at Expedia Group is careers.expediagroup.com/jobs. Expedia is committed to creating an inclusive work environment with a diverse workforce. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, disability, age, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law. This employer participates in E-Verify. The employer will provide the Social Security Administration (SSA) and, if necessary, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) with information from each new employee's I-9 to confirm work authorization.