Senior AI / ML Data Engineer - Layla AI

Expedia•Seattle, WA

About The Position

Expedia Group is a global travel company dedicated to helping travelers explore the world. The Product Team focuses on creating high-quality end-to-end experiences for travelers and partners, driven by a customer-first mindset. Layla, an AI-native travel-planning and booking company now part of Expedia Group, uses a conversational travel assistant to help users move from inspiration to a bookable itinerary. The Layla team operates with startup pace, allowing individuals to own a surface, ship it, and see the impact on real travelers within weeks, with decisions guided by data and AI tooling. As a Senior AI / ML Data Engineer on the Layla team, you will be responsible for building the data foundations that power Layla’s AI-native travel experiences. This includes developing reliable pipelines, high-quality datasets, and providing experimentation and evaluation support to enable the team to confidently ship and improve AI/ML systems in production.

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.