Machine Learning Manager - PPC

Company Description

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Company Name: Booking

Job Description

As a Machine Learning Manager you are a driver of discipline, generating significant business impact directly and indirectly, and craft the direction of product initiatives by being driven and having full ownership of projects. You are responsible for a team of Machine Learning Scientists and Engineers. You will not only work as a coach for your people but also as a technical leader, ensuring that the right technical decisions are made when building our product.

At PPC Bidding, which is part of Booking’s Marketing department, we are developing ML tools and models to optimize bidding strategies and manage Booking’s online search advertising budget (one of the largest online advertising budgets in the world). We are developing machine learning models end-to-end to ensure we efficiently display Booking ads to the right customers depending on their search intent. From predicting a customer’s probability to convert to optimizing marketplace strategy in the competitive space of the digital travel industry, we value innovation, ownership and a result-driven attitude. 

As a machine learning manager you will need to collaborate with different teams and stakeholders to ensure we utilize our budget in the most efficient way. You will also work closely with a team of Machine Learning Scientists and other ML teams in Marketing as well as Marketing and Business teams inside PPC. The team will be responsible for managing and developing Machine Learning models and data pipelines, promoting code quality and best engineering practices.

You are a subject-matter expert in the theory behind one or more of the following areas of machine intelligence: recommendation systems, classification/regression problems, NLP/Computer Vision, uplift modeling and their implementation as end-to-end products that generate direct business impact. You define the strategy and vision for how to generate outsized impact through automated intelligence for a product by driving a research agenda and development plan from ideation to prototyping to full productionisation.

B.Responsible

• Build a strong team within their area, by coaching and developing individual contributors
• Prioritise work in collaboration with product managers and other technical leaders in the department, depending on business needs and keeping stakeholders aligned at all times.
• Translate machine learning vision and strategy into planning and execution, and ensure timely delivery of their plans.
• Make things happen by maintaining motivation and conveying a sense of urgency, focusing on outcomes and accomplishments, while respecting the need to balance long- and short-term goals, by applying influencing techniques and decision making skills.
• Develop innovative ML models, algorithms, and engineering approaches or identify existing ones, with the potential to impact our business. Design and execute applied research plans to understand, apply, test, evolve, and generalise these technologies into reusable frameworks.
• Translate business problems into viable, reliable and robust ML and AI solutions, accounting for constraints of the production environment.
• Monitor product health, performance and business impact and act accordingly when requirements are not met.
• Solve issues by applying methods and insights gained from a variety of disciplines, navigating a variety of environments.
• Drives, coaches and mentors others through evidence and clear communication, explaining advanced technical concepts in simpler terms.
• Continuously evolve their craft. Keep up to date with industry and academic standard methodologies, periodically explore new technologies, introduce them to the machine learning community and promote their application in areas where they can generate impact.
• Actively contribute to Machine Learning at Booking.com through training, exploration of new technologies, interviewing,onboarding and mentoring colleagues.
• Push for improvements, scaling and extending machine learning tooling and infrastructure, collaborating with central teams.

 

B.Skilled

• Experience designing and executing end-to-end research and development plans and generating impact through large-scale machine learning model development. If possible evidenced by peer-reviewed publication, patents, open sourced code or the like.
• Familiarity in the areas like e.g. Recommender Systems, Deep Learning, Information Retrieval, Computer Vision, Speech Recognition, Causal Inference, scaling ML models, etc
• Relevant work or academic experience (MSc + 5 years of working experience, or PhD + 3 years of working experience), involved in the application of Machine Learning to business problems.
• Masters degree, PhD or equivalent experience in a quantitative field (e.g. Computer Science, Mathematics, Artificial Intelligence, Physics, etc.).
• Experience on multiple machine learning facets: working with large data sets, model development, statistics, experimentation, data visualization, optimization, software development.
• Experience collaborating cross functionally in the development of machine learning products (e.g. Developers, UX specialists, Product Managers, etc.).
• Strong working knowledge of Python, Hadoop, SQL, R, Spark or similar technologies.
• Working experience with version control systems.
• Excellent English communication skills, both written and verbal.
• 3+ years leading a team in a growing, fast-paced environment.
• Experience working in a cloud environment is a prerequisite.

B.Offered

• Living and working in Amsterdam, one of the most cosmopolitan cities in Europe
• Contributing to a high scale, complex, world renowned product and seeing real-time impact of your work on millions of travellers worldwide
• Working in a fast-paced and performance driven culture
• Opportunity to utilize technical expertise, leadership capabilities and entrepreneurial spirit
• Promote and drive impactful and innovative engineering solutions
• Technical, behavioural and interpersonal competence advancement via on-the-job opportunities, experimental projects, hackathons, conferences and active community participation
• Competitive compensation and benefits package and some great added perks of working in the home city of Booking.com

 

Booking.com is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and is an affirmative action employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, colour, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, disability, age, or veteran status. We strive to move well beyond traditional equal opportunity and work to create an environment that allows everyone to thrive.

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