Principal Machine Learning Scientist

The Tripadvisor Group connects people to experiences worth sharing, and aims to be the world’s most trusted source for travel and experiences. We leverage our brands, technology, and capabilities to connect our global audience with partners through rich content, travel guidance, and two-sided marketplaces for experiences, accommodations, restaurants, and other travel categories.

About the Role

As a Principal Machine Learning Scientist, you will be the technical anchor for our core discovery engine. You will lead the machine learning strategy and execution that powers how millions of users search for, discover, and organize their complex travel itineraries. This is a high-impact role bridging the gap between cutting-edge AI research and production-grade engineering, directly influencing multi-objective business outcomes like user engagement and booking conversion. You will tackle complex, ambiguous problems at the intersection of deep multi-task ranking, sequential user modeling, and graph-based travel recommendations. If you are passionate about building state-of-the-art AI systems and mentoring a high-performing team of scientists, this role is for you.

What You’ll Do

• Technical Leadership & Execution: Drive the technical roadmap for Search, Retrieval, Ranking, and Recommendation systems within the Trips vertical. Translate high-level business goals into concrete ML architectures and scalable production systems.
• Advanced Algorithm Innovation: Design, prototype, and scale next-generation recommendation and ranking models. Solve complex, non-linear travel journeys by utilizing sequential recommenders, representation learning, and deep multi-objective frameworks.
• System Architecture & Scalability: Oversee the deployment of low-latency, high-throughput retrieval and ranking pipelines capable of processing billions of travel data points in real-time.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner closely with Product Managers, Engineering Leads, and Data Science peers to optimize multi-task business objectives simultaneously. Act as the primary technical authority for ML initiatives within the Trips vertical.
• Talent Multiplier: Mentor and coach senior and mid-level ML scientists. Foster a culture of technical excellence, driving best practices for MLOps, rigorous A/B testing, data privacy, and code quality.

Skills & Experience

• Education: Ph.D. or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Statistics, or a highly quantitative field.
• Experience: 8+ years of industry experience developing and deploying large-scale ML models in a production environment, with a proven track record of shipping systems at the scale of millions of active users.
• Core Technical Expertise: Deep theoretical and practical knowledge in areas such as SOTA Retrieval & Ranking, Sequential & Temporal Modeling, Advanced Representation Learning, Technical Stack, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), and Agentic AI & Generative AI.

What We Offer

• Competitive compensation packages, including base salary and annual bonuses.
• “Work your way” with flexibility to suit your lifestyle.
• Flexible schedule.
• Donation matching.
• Tuition assistance.
• Lifestyle benefit.
• Travel perks.
• Employee assistance program.
• Health benefits.
• Generous referral scheme.

We exist to create value for our customer, the traveler. We enable our suppliers and partners to unlock this value. Their collective behaviours and insights are what drives us. Execution is our edge. We act fast, experiment, learn from failure, iterate, and improve the solutions of tomorrow across every aspect of our business. Our execution is agile, data-driven, prioritised, and built to scale. We assume no problem is someone else’s problem and finish what can be done today, knowing tomorrow will bring fresh challenges. We succeed together. The best outcomes are driven by empathic, humble, and diverse subject matter experts working toward shared goals. We collaborate relentlessly, challenge assumptions, give actionable feedback, and set each other up for success through empowered teams with a clear charter. We transparently take ownership of our growth, individually and as a team. We celebrate the quality of our effort, our learnings, and our collective achievements. We strive to create an accessible and inclusive experience for all candidates. If you need a reasonable accommodation during the application or the recruiting process, please make sure to reach out to your individual recruiter or our team at AccessibleRecruiting@tripadvisor.com.