Principal ML Scientist - Travel Search & Personalization

11105 Expedia, Inc.; United States; On-site; USD 224,000 - 314,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental & vision coverage

Paid time off

Employee Assistance Program

Wellness & travel reimbursement

Travel discounts

IATAN membership

Job summary

Expedia Group is seeking a Principal Applied Scientist to join our Personalization, Search & Recs team. You will lead research and production-ready ML solutions for large-scale travel search and recommendations, combining multi-modal data and context-aware personalization.

The role requires 10+ years in ML, strong Python and ML framework skills, and experience deploying production systems. Collaboration across teams and mentoring is essential in a fast-paced, AI-driven travel platform.

Qualifications

• PhD or MS in Computer Science, ML, Statistics, Engineering or related field, or equivalent experience.
• 10+ years of industry experience in ML, AI, or related field.
• Experience building production-grade search, recommendation or personalization systems.

Responsibilities

• Drive research, design, and deployment of ML solutions for large-scale search/recommendations.
• Architect hybrid multi-modal retrieval frameworks with text, image, and data.
• Develop multi-stage ranking pipelines using deep learning and generative methods.
• Lead intent understanding using user queries and behavior signals.
• Advance personalization with embeddings and context-aware algorithms.
• Pioneer sequential recommender systems accounting for user dynamics.
• Design offline/online evaluation methods including A/B testing.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to translate business needs into ML products.
• Mentor and guide a team of scientists and engineers.

Skills

PhD or MS

10+ years experience

Python

TensorFlow/JAX/PyTorch

Spark

Hadoop

Cloud platforms (AWS/GCP/Azure)

A/B testing

Bias & fairness

Communication

Mentoring

Travel/e‑commerce domain

Education

PhD or MS in CS/ML/Statistics/Engineering

Tools

Spark

Hadoop

AWS

GCP

Azure

TensorFlow/PyTorch/JAX

Job description

Expedia Group is seeking a Principal Applied Scientist to join our Personalization, Search & Recs team. You will lead research and production-ready ML solutions for large-scale travel search and recommendations, combining multi-modal data and context-aware personalization.

The role requires 10+ years in ML, strong Python and ML framework skills, and experience deploying production systems. Collaboration across teams and mentoring is essential in a fast-paced, AI-driven travel platform.