Data Scientist

Job Description

About the company

It wasn’t so long ago that booking a trip to see the Eiffel Tower, stroll down New York’s iconic Madison Avenue or feel the sand between our toes on Copacabana Beach was simply a matter of a few taps on our smartphone.

In fact, that’s what we do at Booking.com. We make it easier for everyone to experience the world. And while that world might feel a little farther away right now, we’re busy preparing for when the world is ready to travel once more.

Across our offices worldwide, we continue to innovate. To solve for some of the most complex challenges in travel and technology, and to plan for the exciting developments that lie ahead. With strategic long-term investments into what we believe the future of travel can be, we are opening up new career opportunities that will have a strong impact on our mission.

We are united in the belief that our very human desire to explore the planet’s beauty and discover more about other people and cultures will endure. The world is waiting for us. Together, we will be ready.

From our HQ in Manchester, our Transportation team helps people get where they want to go, anywhere in the world. Whether customers want the freedom of a car, the ease of a taxi or the economy of public transport, we make it all possible.

Our team is passionate about helping people travel. They see challenges as opportunities. And they’re always ready for change.

Booking.com core values

• Think customer first
• Succeed together
• Own It
• Learn Forever
• Do the Right Thing

The role

As part of the Booking.com Transport Business Unit paid search bidding team, you’ll be working to manage and optimise one of the largest paid search budgets in the UK. You’ll use your expertise to leverage large datasets to build and improve a variety of machine learning models, covering all aspects of paid search, improving the efficiency of our bidding, user targeting, attribution and customer segmentation across multiple platforms to stay ahead of the competition.

Working with the wider Booking.com paid search team, you’ll also have extensive opportunities to collaborate with a large team of Data Scientists in multiple locations on various projects, driving value across various areas of the business.

As a Data Scientist you’ll take full ownership of your work - from the initial idea-generation phase to testing and the implementation of the final product. You will thrive at Booking.com if you are result-focused, innovative, and with a solid quantitative background, and by building an understanding of our complex business model.

Key responsibilities

• Work in a multi-disciplined team where you’ll contribute by turning discoveries and ideas from colleagues into machine learning models. You’ll use the models in production to improve various aspects of our current bidding, targeting and attribution processes
• Research & Development on how to improve the efficiency of our current paid search bidding strategy, using a clean dataset containing over 7 years of paid search data
• Actively contribute to taking Data Science at Booking.com to the next level
• Work with and challenge others to ensure that we’re continually improving the work we do on a daily basis

Skills & Experience

• Minimum two years of relevant work experience
• Masters, PhD, or equivalent experience in a quantitative field (Computer Science, Mathematics, Engineering, Statistics, Machine Learning, etc.)
• Excellent communication skills; the ability to convey your message to team members and other stakeholders
• Prior experience with a few of the following models: Regression, Support Vector Machines, (Deep) Neural Networks, Hidden Markov Models, Conditional Random Fields, Game Theory, Mechanism Design and/or Latent Dirichlet Allocation

Required

• Proficiency in Python and experience in one of the following: R, Octave, Matlab, SPSS or SAS
• Exposure to SQL and relational databases

Preferred

• Worked with the Hadoop Ecosystem
• Experience mentoring other Data Scientists
• A basic understanding of paid search (PPC)