Principal Machine Learning Scientist - Personalization and Search & Recommendations
$224k - $314k • Washington - Seattle Campus • Full-time
Posted 2d ago
Job Location
Washington - Seattle Campus
Tech Stack
Remote Work Policy
On-site
Employment Type
Full-time
Categories
Machine Learning Engineer
About the job
Expedia Group is seeking a Principal Applied Scientist to join their Personalization, Search & Recs team. This role will be a key contributor to the thought leadership, development, and optimization of Expedia's AI models for search and personalization, including natural language search, multi-modal search, recommendations, and generative AI-based traveler experiences. The ideal candidate is a deep learning and ML expert capable of developing effective AI solutions for search and recommendations, with a focus on innovation and implementing cutting-edge technology. This is a significant opportunity to build foundational systems within a strategic, AI-first area of the company.
Responsibilities
- Drive 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 using deep learning and generative retrieval.
- Lead efforts in intent understanding using user queries, behavioral signals, and context.
- Advance personalization strategies using embeddings, user-item modeling, and context-aware algorithms.
- Pioneer sequential recommender systems that adapt to evolving user preferences and session context.
- Design robust offline and online evaluation methodologies, including A/B testing and metric development.
- Collaborate with cross-functional teams to translate business needs into ML problems and production solutions.
- Mentor and guide a team of scientists, promoting best-in-class research and deployment practices.
Requirements
- PhD or MS in Computer Science, Machine Learning, 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.
- Proficiency in Python and ML frameworks like TensorFlow, JAX, or PyTorch.
- Experience with large-scale distributed systems and big data technologies (e.g., Spark, Hadoop).
- Familiarity with A/B testing and experimentation methodologies.
- Ability to work with large-scale, real-world data, considering bias, fairness, and privacy.
- Excellent communication skills for technical and non-technical audiences.
- Demonstrated ability to mentor and technically lead research or engineering teams.
- Passion for building user-centric AI products and advancing state-of-the-art in search and recommendations.
Benefits
- Medical, dental, and vision coverage
- Paid time off
- Employee Assistance Program
- Wellness and travel reimbursement
- Travel discounts
- International Airlines Travel Agent Network (IATAN) membership