Staff/Principal Machine Learning Scientist – Ranking & Retrieval

Overview

As Principal Machine Learning Scientist at Tripadvisor, you will anchor the core discovery engine and steer ML strategy across search, retrieval, ranking, and recommendations. You’ll bridge cutting-edge AI research with production systems to influence user engagement and bookings at scale. You’ll tackle multi-task ranking, sequential modeling, and graph-based travel recommendations, mentoring a team of scientists and shaping long-term ML architecture. This role offers scope to impact millions of travelers and advance the Trips ecosystem through state-of-the-art AI.

Pay / Benefits

• Competitive compensation
• Remote-friendly with flexible on-site options
• Flexible schedule
• Tuition assistance
• Travel perks
• Health benefits

Responsibilities

• Set the technical roadmap for search, retrieval, ranking, and recommendations within the Trips vertical
• Design and scale next-generation ML models for multi-objective optimization
• Oversee low-latency, high-throughput data pipelines and real-time retrieval/ranking (e.g., vector search)
• Collaborate with Product, Engineering leads, and DS peers to align ML initiatives with business goals
• Mentor and develop senior and mid-level ML scientists, promoting MLOps, A/B testing, and data privacy

Key requirements

• 8+ years of industry experience shipping large-scale ML models in production
• Experience deploying systems with millions of active users
• Deep knowledge of SOTA retrieval and ranking, MTL, and MMoe or similar architectures
• Strong background in sequential/temporal modeling and representation learning
• Proficiency with Python and DL frameworks (TensorFlow, PyTorch)
• Experience with distributed computing (Spark, Ray) and cloud platforms (AWS/GCP)

• Graduate-to-executive communication
• Mentorship and team leadership
• Cross-functional collaboration
• TensorFlow
• PyTorch
• Spark

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