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:

Expedia Technology teams partner with our Product teams to create innovative products, services, and tools to deliver high-quality experiences for travelers, partners, and our employees. A singular technology platform powered by data and machine learning provides secure, differentiated, and personalized experiences that drive loyalty and traveler satisfaction.

We are looking for a Principal Machine Learning Scientist to join our growing Travel Search & Discovery team. This position focuses on the development and optimization of Expedia’s Search & Recommendation AI models including natural language search, multi-modal search, Recommendations, and generative AI–based discovery. The ideal candidate for this position is a true deep learning expert who can develop effective AI solutions for search and recommendations. Innovation and developing cutting-edge technology as well as implementing industry-leading solutions are key responsibilities of this role. This is a rare opportunity to build foundational systems in a high-impact domain, backed by Expedia’s AI-first vision.

In this role, you will:

• Drive the research, design, and deployment of advanced machine learning solutions for large-scale search and recommendation systems

• Architect hybrid multi-modal retrieval frameworks, combining text, image, and structured data to power relevant and diverse content discovery

• Develop and optimize multi-stage ranking pipelines, leveraging deep learning, generative retrieval, and other advanced algorithms to maximize relevance and engagement

• Lead efforts on intent understanding, utilizing user queries, behavioral signals, and context for superior search and recommendation accuracy

• Advance personalization strategies using embeddings, user-item modeling, and context-aware algorithms to tailor content to individual users

• Pioneer cutting-edge sequential recommender systems that account for evolving user preferences, session context, and temporal dynamics

• Design robust offline and online evaluation methodologies, including A/B testing, counterfactual estimation, and metric development

• Collaborate closely with cross-functional engineering and product teams to translate business needs into machine learning problems and production-ready solutions

• Mentor and guide a team of scientists, driving best-in-class research and deployment practices

  Minimum Qualifications:

• PhD, or MS, in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Statistics, Engineering, or a related field; or equivalent professional experience

• 10+ years of related industry experience

• Experience building production-grade search, recommendation or personalization systems

• Strong understanding of intent understanding techniques, retrieval methods, deep learning for recommendations, reinforcement learning, and causal inference

• Proficiency in Python and ML frameworks such as Tensor Flow, JAX, or Py Torch

• Experience with large-scale distributed systems and big data technologies (e.g., Spark, Hadoop)

• Familiarity with A/B testing and experimentation methodologies

• Ability to work with large-scale, real-world data with attention to bias, fairness, and privacy

• Excellent communication skills for both technical and non-technical audiences

• Demonstrated ability to mentor and technically lead research or engineering teams

• A passion for building user-centric AI products and a keen curiosity about advancing the state-of-the-art in search and recommendations

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience in the travel or e-commerce industry

• Familiarity with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure)

• Publications in top-tier ML conferences or journals

• Contributions to open-source ML projects

• Experience in personalization systems

• Experience taking models from prototype to production in collaboration with Machine Learning Engineering teams

The total cash range for this position in San Jose is $242,000.00 to $338,500.00. Employees in this role have the potential to increase their pay up to $387,000.00, which is the top of the range, based on ongoing, demonstrated, and sustained performance in the role.

Starting pay for this role will vary based on multiple factors, including location, available budget, and an individual’s knowledge, skills, and experience. Pay ranges may be modified in the future.

Expedia Group is proud to offer a wide range of benefits to support employees and their families, including medical/dental/vision, paid time off, and an Employee Assistance Program. To fuel each employee’s passion for travel, we offer a wellness & travel reimbursement, travel discounts, and an International Airlines Travel Agent (IATAN) membership. View our full list of benefits.

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.

We are proud to be named as a Best Place to Work on Glassdoor in 2024 and be recognized for award-winning culture by organizations like Forbes, TIME, Disability:IN, and others.

Expedia Group's family of brands includes: Brand Expedia®, Hotels.com®, Expedia® Partner Solutions, Vrbo®, trivago®, Orbitz®, Travelocity®, Hotwire®, Wotif®, ebookers®, Cheap Tickets®, Expedia Group™ Media Solutions, Expedia Local Expert®, Car Rentals.com™, and Expedia Cruises™. © 2024 Expedia, Inc. All rights reserved. Trademarks and logos are the property of their respective owners. CST: 2029030-50

Employment opportunities and job offers at Expedia Group will always come from Expedia Group’s Talent Acquisition and hiring teams. Never provide sensitive, personal information to someone unless you’re confident who the recipient is. Expedia Group does not extend job offers via email or any other messaging tools to individuals with whom we have not made prior contact. Our email domain is @expediagroup.com. The official website to find and apply for job openings at Expedia Group is careers.expediagroup.com/jobs.

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, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, disability, age, or veteran status. This employer participates in E-Verify. The employer will provide the Social Security Administration (SSA) and, if necessary, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) with information from each new employee's I-9 to confirm work authorization.