Principal ML Scientist – Leader in Search & Personalization

Expedia, Inc.; San Jose (CA); On-site; USD 242,000 - 339,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical benefits

Dental & Vision

Paid time off

EAP

Wellness & travel reimbursement

IATAN membership

Job summary

Expedia Group in San Jose is seeking a Principal Applied Scientist to lead the design, development, and deployment of advanced AI models for search and recommendations. You will architect multi-modal retrieval and ranking pipelines, and guide personalization with embeddings and sequential recommenders to enhance travel experiences.

The role requires 10+ years in production ML, deep learning expertise, strong communication, and a focus on bias-aware, privacy-conscious AI within a global AI-first

Qualifications

• PhD or MS in CS, ML, Statistics, Engineering, or related field; or equivalent professional experience.
• 10+ years of related industry experience
• Experience building production-grade search, recommendation or personalization systems
• Strong understanding of intent understanding techniques, retrieval methods, deep learning for recommendations, reinforcement learning, and causal inference

Responsibilities

• Drive the research, design, and deployment of advanced machine learning solutions for large-scale search and recommendation systems
• Architect hybrid multi-modal retrieval frameworks, combining text, image, and structured data
• Develop and optimize multi-stage ranking pipelines, leveraging deep learning, generative retrieval, and other advanced algorithms
• Lead efforts on intent understanding, utilizing user queries, behavioral signals, and context
• Advance personalization strategies using embeddings, user-item modeling, and context-aware algorithms
• Pioneer cutting-edge sequential recommender systems that account for evolving user preferences and context

Skills

Python

TensorFlow/JAX/PyTorch

Large-scale ML systems

A/B testing

Education

PhD or MS in CS/ML/Statistics or related

Tools

Spark

Hadoop

Cloud platforms

Job description

Expedia Group in San Jose is seeking a Principal Applied Scientist to lead the design, development, and deployment of advanced AI models for search and recommendations. You will architect multi-modal retrieval and ranking pipelines, and guide personalization with embeddings and sequential recommenders to enhance travel experiences.

The role requires 10+ years in production ML, deep learning expertise, strong communication, and a focus on bias-aware, privacy-conscious AI within a global AI-first