Senior Data Scientist (Look-2-Book)

Emerging Travel Group

10d • Hybrid

About The Position

Lead ML projects from formulating hypotheses and task setting to delivering measurable business impact. You will be responsible for the entire cycle, ensuring fast time-to-market and maintaining model quality in production. Work closely with Data Engineers to build robust production data pipelines, and with Data Analysts to dive into business context, define metrics, and design/evaluate A/B tests. Translate complex travel/B2B business problems into mathematical and ML modeling tasks. Key challenges include: Look-to-Book Optimization: Design and deploy scoring models to accurately predict the probability of a search query converting into a booking (look-to-book), model how this likelihood changes dynamically with price and availability, and optimize the entire search-to-book funnel / Multi-objective Optimization: Simultaneous optimization of margin/profitability and operational incident minimization; sophisticated trade-off recommendations factoring in B2B client preferences / Cache Freshness Prediction: Predict the likelihood of rates/offers becoming stale before booking, helping find the right balance between data accuracy, speed, and system load. Develop, train, and validate machine learning models to test product hypotheses and proactively improve the B2B user experience.

Requirements

• At least 4+ years of hands-on experience as a Data Scientist or ML Engineer.
• Ability to dig into data, identify root business problems, and translate business objectives into clear ML tasks.
• Solid knowledge of classic Machine Learning (Gradient Boosting like CatBoost/LightGBM, Classification, Regression).
• Proven experience with entity matching tasks.
• Deep understanding of Recommendation Systems and Ranking approaches (KNN, FAISS, Learning-to-Rank, pointwise / pairwise / listwise approaches).
• Confident experience working with massive datasets (terabytes processed daily).
• Excellent SQL skills.
• Practical experience building pipelines with PySpark.
• Production-quality Python code.
• Ability to write tests.
• Readiness to bring models to production (experience with Airflow and Python microservices).

Nice To Haves

• Experience in TravelTech, E-commerce, or B2B APIs (understanding of hotels, rates, distributors).
• Basic NLP skills, understanding the principles of text embeddings and how to train them.
• Experience with dynamic pricing, multi-objective optimization, or Next Best Action (NBA) systems.
• A solid foundation in probability theory and mathematical statistics for rigorous experiment design and model evaluation.

Responsibilities

• Lead ML projects from formulating hypotheses and task setting to delivering measurable business impact.
• Responsible for the entire ML project cycle, ensuring fast time-to-market and maintaining model quality in production.
• Work closely with Data Engineers to build robust production data pipelines.
• Collaborate with Data Analysts to dive into business context, define metrics, and design/evaluate A/B tests.
• Translate complex travel/B2B business problems into mathematical and ML modeling tasks.
• Design and deploy scoring models to accurately predict the probability of a search query converting into a booking (look-to-book).
• Model how look-to-book likelihood changes dynamically with price and availability.
• Optimize the entire search-to-book funnel.
• Perform simultaneous optimization of margin/profitability and operational incident minimization.
• Provide sophisticated trade-off recommendations factoring in B2B client preferences.
• Predict the likelihood of rates/offers becoming stale before booking.
• Develop, train, and validate machine learning models to test product hypotheses.
• Proactively improve the B2B user experience.

Benefits

• Fully flexible work schedule.
• Choice of work format: fully remote, in-office, or hybrid.
• Internal programs for adaptation and training.
• Development of soft skills and leadership abilities tailored individually.
• Partial compensation for external training and conferences.
• Support for English language learning (group and individual lessons, speaking clubs).
• Corporate prices on hotels and other travel services.
• MyTime Day Off - an extra day off for health, mental recharge, personal issues, etc.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed