Machine Learning Scientist (For independent contractors)

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 encounter. The journeys you take. The sights you see. And the memories you make. Through our products, partners and people, we make it easier for everyone to experience the world.

About the team: This opening is for the GenAI Applications Team within the Data & AI Marketplace department. The GenAI Applications team is responsible for designing and delivering agentic, ML-powered solutions for some of our most impactful products, including booking search experiences, trip planning, and trip helpfulness. The team builds AI-driven applications and conversational agents, such as chatbots and intelligent assistants, that significantly enhance the end-to-end customer experience.

Role Description: As a Senior Machine Learning Scientist, you will work closely with engineers and to design, develop, and evaluate machine learning solutions for scalable, customer-facing GenAI applications. Your work will focus on researching, training, fine-tuning, and rigorously evaluating models leveraging LLMs, recommendation systems, and agent-based architectures, using state-of-the-art techniques. You will drive experimentation, define success metrics, and translate insights into impactful AI solutions that shape the future of intelligent travel products.

Key Job Responsibilities and Duties: Explore and apply state-of-the-art techniques in multimodal machine learning. Train innovative ML models (NLP, CV, LLM-finetuning…), build algorithms, and engineering approaches to drive business impact.

Coding skills: ensure implementation of reusable frameworks (clean and scalable code). Conduct data analysis with detailed metrics to evaluate model’s performance, labels quality, features exploration. Work closely with machine learning engineers to ensure the model's latency/throughput meets product requirements and ensure deployment of your model to production.

Collaborate with multidisciplinary teams: Collaborate with product managers, data scientists, and analysts to understand business requirements and translate them into machine learning solutions.

Qualifications & Skills: Advanced knowledge and experience in Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing, engineering aspects of developing ML and GenerativeAI models at scale. 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 + 3 years of working experience, or PhD + 2 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, Engineering 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. 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.