Machine Learning Scientist II

Expedia Group brands power global travel for everyone, everywhere. We design cutting‑edge tech to make travel smoother and more memorable, and we create groundbreaking solutions for our partners. Our diverse, vibrant, and welcoming community is essential in driving our success.

Why Join Us? To shape the future of travel, people must come first. Guided by our Values and Leadership Agreements, we foster an open culture where everyone belongs, differences are celebrated and know that when one of us wins, we all win. We provide a full benefits package, including exciting travel perks, generous time‑off, parental leave, a flexible work model (with some pretty cool offices), and career development resources, all to fuel our employees' passion for travel and ensure a rewarding career journey. We’re building a more open world. Join us.

Introduction to the team The Machine Learning Scientist II role sits on the Content Relevance Ranking AI team in the Expedia Technology division of Expedia Group. This team develops and optimizes ranking models with state‑of‑the‑art machine learning techniques to power the selection and ranking of property images and reviews for the multiple brands in our portfolio. In this role, your expertise and passion for innovation, developing cutting‑edge technology and implementing industry‑leading solutions, will improve the experience of millions of travelers and travel partners each year. This is an applied research role: your models will be deployed to our production systems, and your results will be measured objectively via A/B testing, directly impacting our business results. We collaborate closely with the analytics, product, and engineering teams.

In this role, you will:

• Work with product management to understand business problems, identify challenges and machine learning opportunities, and scope solutions.
• Conduct exploratory data analysis, formulate machine learning problems, and build effective models.
• Partner with data and software engineering teams to deliver your solutions into production.
• Develop a deep understanding of our data and ML infrastructure.
• Document the technical details of your work.
• Present your ideas and results to product management, stakeholders, and leadership teams in a clear and effective manner.
• Collaborate and brainstorm with other team members and across the company.
• Stay current with advances in ML and GenAI to drive innovation within the team.

Minimum Qualifications

• Master’s degree or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Statistics, Math, Engineering, or a related technical field; or equivalent related professional experience.
• You have 2+ years hands-on experience with ML in production, building datasets, selecting and engineering features, building and optimizing algorithms.
• You have expertise with Python and related machine learning tools, deep learning frameworks such as TensorFlow or PyTorch, and SQL-like query languages for data extraction, transformation, and loading.
• A strong foundation in Machine Learning fundamentals, statistics, and experimentation.
• You have real‑world experience working with large data sets in a distributed computing environment such as Spark.
• You have good programming practices, ability to write readable, fast code.
• You have intellectual curiosity and desire to learn new things, techniques and technologies.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with ranking systems and recent Large Language Models (LLMs), including fine‑tuning, efficient deployment, and architectures.
• Comfortable working with ML platforms like Databricks and Cloud platforms such as AWS, and Docker.
• Hands‑on experience with workflow orchestration tools (e.g., Airflow, Flyte).

Accommodation requests If you need assistance with any part of the application or recruiting process due to a disability, or other physical or mental health conditions, please reach out to our Recruiting Accommodations Team through the Accommodation Request.

Expedia is committed to creating an inclusive work environment with a diverse workforce. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, national origin, disability or age.