Senior Director of Machine Learning (Experiences)

Overview

As Senior Director, Machine Learning, you will lead and shape Tripadvisor’s ML, data science, and experimentation efforts to unlock growth and competitive advantage. You’ll oversee personalization, recommendation and ranking systems, rigorous experimentation, and responsible generative-AI initiatives, all grounded in first-party data. The role combines strategic leadership with hands-on technologist execution in a hub-and-spoke model, partnering across Product, Engineering and Analytics.

Pay / Benefits

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

Responsibilities

• Build and lead a unified ML organization in a hub-and-spoke model
• Define the operating model, decision rights, and service commitments for product-area momentum
• Own the personalization strategy including recommender and search-relevance systems
• Lead data science and experimentation, including A/B testing and impact measurement
• Shape generative-AI direction for Experiences, with evaluation for quality and cost
• Grow, develop, and retain the team, including career ladders and talent processes
• Own production ML health: deployment, monitoring, and governance with SLAs
• Partner with Product, Engineering, Design, and Analytics to translate strategy into an ML roadmap
• Represent ML in executive planning and connect model performance to business outcomes
• Collaborate with MLOps to maintain robust, scalable ML infrastructure

Key requirements

• Substantial experience in machine learning and leading managers/senior technical teams
• Track record shipping production ML at scale with measurable business impact
• Experience building/scaling ML or data-science organizations and change management
• Ability to operate as an executive peer influencing senior partners across Product and Engineering
• Strategic, technically proficient, and able to review architectures while upholding scientific rigor
• Strong grounding in experimentation and statistics (A/B testing, causal inference)
• MS in Computer Science, Statistics, Mathematics, or related field, or equivalent depth of applied experience
• Excellent communication translating ML concepts to business decisions

• Strategic thinking
• Leadership and people management
• Cross-functional collaboration
• Personalization and ranking systems
• Recommendation engines and search relevance
• Experimentation platforms and A/B testing

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