Lead Data Scientist

Job Description

Using billions of data points, Booking.com’s Tel Aviv machine learning center combines data science and product development to create smart, personalised and frictionless experiences for our customers. With an international team, our experts work together everyday to solve problems and create new solutions that impact the millions of customers we serve all across the globe.

As a Lead Machine Learning Scientist you are a leader of your discipline across multiple teams, who generates significant business impact directly and indirectly, crafts the direction of product initiatives and research areas by being driven, having full ownership of your projects, bringing them from the initial idea-generation phase to implementation together with Machine Learning Engineers, Data Engineers, Product Managers, UX designers, etc, while guiding them in the application of Machine Learning.

B.Responsible

• Develop innovative ML models, algorithms, and engineering approaches or identify existing ones, successfully and consistently impacting our business. Design and execute applied research plans to understand, apply, test, evolve, and generalise these technologies into reusable frameworks. Exhibit best practices to be successful on these tasks and advise others on doing so.
• Translate business problems into viable, reliable and robust ML and AI solutions, across the full ML stack (e.g. architecture, training data, modeling approach, and scalability), and accounting for constraints of the production environment.
• Develop production-grade machine learning code, from models to features and pipelines, allowing for scalability, realtime, monitoring and retraining, when necessary from scratch and following engineering best practices.
• Build readable and reusable code, choosing the right technologies and coding methodologies applying knowledge of business area tools and product needs.
• Monitor product health, performance and business impact and act accordingly when requirements are not met.
• Identify underlying issues and opportunities across areas, domains and situations that are not obviously related through application of structured thinking and logic. Guides and supports teams dealing with complex scenarios.
• Solve issues by applying methods and insights gained from a variety of disciplines. Complete different tasks and navigate into several environments with a short adapting period.
• Make things happen by maintaining motivation and conveying a sense of urgency, focusing on outcomes and accomplishments, while respecting the need to balance long- and short-term goals, by applying influencing techniques and decision making skills.
• Drives, coaches and mentors others through evidence and clear communication, explaining advanced technical concepts in simpler terms.
• Continuously evolve your craft. Keep up to date with industry and academic standard methodologies, periodically explore new technologies, introduce them to the machine learning community and promote 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.

B.Skilled

• Advanced knowledge and experience in one of the following domains: Recommender Systems, Deep Learning, Information Retrieval, Computer Vision, Speech Recognition, Causal Inference, scaling ML models, etc
• 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 or academic experience (MSc + 5 years of working experience, or PhD + 3 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, Hadoop, SQL, R, Spark or similar technologies.
• Excellent English communication skills, both written and verbal.

B.Offered

We are a performance-based company that offers career advancement and lucrative compensation, including bonuses and stock potential. We also offer what we call the “Booking Deal” with unique perks and benefits. The Technology Department has regular hackathons, “innovation days”, training, and attends and speaks at global conferences.

This position is open to local candidates only.