Location
London (Remote-friendly with option to join on-site as desired or required)

Hours
Flexible schedule to suit your lifestyle

Salary
Negotiable

About the Role
As a Senior Machine Learning Scientist at Tripadvisor Experiences R&D Team, you will be a key technical lead and pod architect within our core discovery engine. You will independently own and execute the machine learning strategy for major product capabilities such as Search, Retrieval, Ranking, or Content AI that power how millions of users discover and plan their travel itineraries. This role bridges the gap between state-of-the-art research and production-grade engineering, requiring you to navigate technical ambiguity, implement custom algorithmic components, and map offline model metrics directly to business KPIs like booking conversion and user engagement. You will lead rapid prototyping, practical deployment of SOTA models, and multiply the capabilities of your peers through mentorship and collaboration.

What You’ll Do
- Act as technical lead for ML projects within your pod, designing and implementing custom model components or loss functions.
- Evaluate global research landscape to balance model complexity with inference speed, memory usage, and execution costs.
- Optimize models for production using techniques like quantization and distillation.
- Tailor Golden Datasets and leaderboards, implement rigorous validation automation to prevent data leakage and production regressions.
- Collaborate with Engineering Leads to ensure infrastructure supports model requirements and define failure modes and fallback systems.
- Diagnose complex algorithmic bugs and implement automated checks to detect silent failures.
- Lead team post-mortems and corrective actions.
- Mentor mid-level and associate ML scientists, ensuring scientific rigor and guiding applied ML practices.

What We Offer
Competitive compensation packages including base salary and annual bonuses. Flexible and remote-friendly work environment. Work-life balance ingrained in our culture. Donation matching for charitable giving. Tuition assistance for career development. Annual lifestyle benefit to spend on travel, wellness, or other personal interests. Travel perks and discounts. Employee assistance programs. Comprehensive health benefits. Generous referral scheme rewarding successful candidate referrals.

Our Cultural Pillars
- Traveler first: We create value for travelers and partners.
- Execution is our edge: Agile, data-driven, and scalable solutions.
- We succeed together: Collaborative, humble, diverse teams driving shared goals and celebrating collective achievements.

Experience
5+ years of industry experience developing, validating, and deploying large-scale ML models in production environments.

About you
Relentlessly curious scientist with strong practical and theoretical foundation in machine learning, feature engineering, and deep learning paradigms. Proven ability to adapt and hybridize state-of-the-art architectures to solve complex business problems. Experience with multi-task learning, ranking, Content AI stacks, and Agentic AI is highly desirable. Skilled in rapid prototyping, practical SOTA deployment, and mentoring peers.

Qualifications
Master’s or Ph.D. degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Statistics, or a highly quantitative field.

Technical Skills
Mastery of Python and deep learning frameworks such as PyTorch, PyTorch Lightning, or TensorFlow. Familiarity with data versioning and experiment tracking tools. Experience with next-generation retrieval pipelines, multi-stage ranking systems, Content AI stacks, advanced sequential recommendation systems, Graph Neural Networks, knowledge graphs, multi-modal representation learning, generative AI, and Agentic AI workflows is a strong plus.