Senior AI / ML Data Engineer - Layla AI

Expedia•Austin, TX

1d•$184,500 - $295,000

About The Position

Expedia Group is looking for a Senior AI / ML Data Engineer to join the Layla Team. Layla is an AI-native travel-planning and booking company, now part of Expedia Group’s Product organization. Through a conversational travel assistant, Layla helps travelers move from inspiration to a complete, bookable itinerary — flights, hotels, activities, and the day-by-day detail — in minutes. As part of Expedia Group, the team combines Layla’s planning and personalization capabilities with Expedia Group’s global supply, first-party traveler insights, marketplace scale, and booking technology. The team is small and senior by design and operates with startup pace: you own a surface, ship it, and see the impact on real travelers within weeks — with decisions driven by data and AI tooling used in practice every day. As a Senior AI / ML Data Engineer, you will build the data foundations that power Layla’s AI-native travel experiences — the reliable pipelines, high-quality datasets, and experimentation and evaluation support that let the team ship and improve AI/ML systems in production with confidence.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Data Engineering, or a related technical field; or equivalent related professional experience.
8+ years of relevant professional experience.
Strong data engineering expertise, including advanced SQL and data modeling, and experience designing and operating production data pipelines.
Proficiency with Python for data engineering work.
Demonstrated ability to own data quality, reliability, and observability for critical datasets in production.
Familiarity with supporting AI/ML systems in production — such as data/feature pipelines, evaluation datasets, or experimentation — and applying AI/ML concepts to real-world products responsibly.

Nice To Haves

Experience with a modern data stack (for example, a transformation framework such as dbt, a cloud warehouse such as BigQuery or Snowflake, and BI tools such as Looker or Metabase).
Experience building and maintaining experimentation frameworks and product analytics for a consumer product with real paid acquisition.
Experience with attribution modeling, including an understanding of its limitations.
Experience supporting production AI/ML or generative-AI systems (feature pipelines, evaluation, or monitoring), with attention to safety and responsible use.
Experience using AI-assisted development tools (for example, Claude or similar) to improve productivity, quality, and delivery speed.
Experience in travel, marketplace, or e-commerce domains, or building a data/analytics function from scratch.

Responsibilities

Design, build, and operate reliable, scalable data pipelines that power Layla’s AI-native trip-planning and booking experiences across Layla and Bellboy.
Own data quality, reliability, and observability across critical datasets, establishing well-documented, trustworthy data models that other teams can confidently extend.
Build and support the data foundations for experimentation and model evaluation, enabling honest, timely readouts that inform product and AI/ML decisions.
Enable the production use of AI/ML systems — supporting feature and data availability, evaluation datasets, and monitoring — while applying AI/ML concepts responsibly.
Partner closely with Product, Analytics, and ML/engineering teams to turn ambiguous questions into dependable data and self-serve answers.
Advocate for engineering excellence in data — testing, documentation, and reusable patterns — and mentor other engineers on best practices.