Hybrid Senior Director, ML/AI – Search and Recommendations

at Expedia Group

• Job title: Senior Director, ML/AI – Search and Recommendations
• Job type: Full Time
• Experience level: Senior
• Salary: $296,000 - $414,500 per year
• Degree requirement: Postgraduate Degree
• Location requirements: Hybrid, Seattle, United States

About the role

• Leads strategic vision for Search and Recommendation algorithms at Expedia Group, managing a large organization of Applied Scientists and ML Leaders to optimize ranking systems.

Responsibilities

• Define and execute the scientific roadmap for the company’s most critical asset, the Search and Recommendation stack
• Act as the primary counterpart to senior Product and Engineering leadership
• Own the high-level architectural decision-making for search ranking and recommendations
• Champion a strategy to move from fragmented models to large-scale Ranking Foundation Models
• Manage and mentor a large, multi-disciplinary organization of Applied Scientists and ML Leaders
• Ensure our algorithms optimize for long-term business value while maintaining a healthy ecosystem for our supply partners

Requirements

• PhD or Master’s in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Statistics, or a related field, or equivalent professional experience
• 15+ years of experience in Data Science and Machine Learning, with 8+ years of experience managing high-performing science teams and managing managers
• Deep technical authority in Search and Ranking: Proven experience designing and deploying large-scale Ranking Foundation Models, Representation Learning, and Retrieval systems (e.g., Learning-to-Rank, Two-Tower architectures, Multi-Task Learning)
• Expertise in Model Distillation: Experience training large-scale 'Teacher' models and applying Knowledge Distillation techniques to create efficient 'Student' models for high-throughput production ranking
• Architectural Leadership: Experience making build-vs-buy decisions and designing ML systems that handle massive scale and real-time inference requirements
• Stakeholder Influence: Strong business acumen and ability to influence executive stakeholders; capable of explaining complex architectural trade-offs to non-technical partners.

Benefits

• full benefits package, including exciting travel perks
• generous time-off
• parental leave
• a flexible work model (with some pretty cool offices)
• career development resources
• wellness & travel reimbursement
• travel discounts
• International Airlines Travel Agent ( IATAN ) membership
• medical/dental/vision
• Employee Assistance Program