Senior Machine Learning Scientist (Experiences)

Overview

In this role you lead ML initiatives for Tripadvisor Experiences, guiding the discovery engine’s strategy and delivering production-ready models that power Search, Retrieval, Ranking, and Content AI. You’ll bridge cutting-edge research with engineering, translating offline metrics into business impact like bookings and engagement. You’ll mentor peers and drive robust, scalable ML systems within a fast-paced, collaborative team. This is a chance to shape a world-class travel marketplace.

Pay / Benefits

• remote-friendly
• flexible schedule
• donation matching
• tuition assistance
• travel perks
• health benefits

Responsibilities

• Act as technical lead for ML projects within your pod
• Design and implement custom model components or loss functions beyond off-the-shelf options
• Evaluate research landscape and perform cost-benefit analyses on new architectures
• Optimize models for production (quantization, distillation)
• Create and maintain rigorous validation frameworks and backtesting to prevent data leakage
• Coordinate with Engineering Leads to align compute/GPU infrastructure with model needs
• Define model failure modes and confidence thresholds for robust fallbacks
• Lead team-level post-mortems and guide corrective actions
• Mentor mid-level and associate ML scientists on experimental rigor and production constraints

Key requirements

• 5+ years of industry experience developing, validating, and deploying large-scale ML models in production
• Strong foundation in ML techniques, feature engineering, and deep learning
• Experience adapting and hybridizing SOTA architectures for business problems
• Familiarity with multi-task learning (MTL), ranking, Content AI stacks, Agentic AI (desirable)
• Proficiency in Python and deep learning frameworks (PyTorch, PyTorch Lightning, TensorFlow)
• Experience with data versioning and experiment tracking tools

• Collaborative mindset across engineering and product teams
• Mentorship and ability to review others’ experimental logic
• Curiosity and rapid prototyping mindset
• Python
• PyTorch
• PyTorch Lightning

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