Staff/Principal Machine Learning Scientist – Ranking & Retrieval

Responsibilities

We are representing a confidential travel technology organization seeking a Staff/Principal Machine Learning Scientist to serve as the technical anchor for their core discovery engine. In this high-impact role, you will lead the machine learning strategy and execution that powers how millions of users search for, discover, and organize complex travel itineraries.

You will drive the technical roadmap for search, retrieval, ranking, and recommendation systems, translating high-level business goals into concrete ML architectures and scalable production systems. Your work will directly influence multi-objective business outcomes including user engagement and booking conversion.

• Design, prototype, and scale next-generation recommendation and ranking models to solve complex, non-linear user journeys utilizing sequential recommenders, representation learning, and deep multi-objective frameworks
• Oversee deployment of low-latency, high-throughput retrieval and ranking pipelines capable of processing billions of data points in real-time, including multi-stage retrieval and vector search systems
• 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, bridging the gap between cutting-edge AI research and production-grade engineering
• Mentor and coach senior and mid-level ML scientists, fostering a culture of technical excellence and driving best practices for MLOps, rigorous A/B testing, data privacy, and code quality

What We're Looking For

Required qualifications:

• Ph.D. or Master's degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Statistics, or a highly quantitative field
• 8+ years of industry experience developing and deploying large-scale ML models in production environments, with a proven track record of shipping systems serving millions of active users
• Deep theoretical and practical knowledge of state-of-the-art retrieval and ranking techniques, including Multi-Task Learning (MTL), Multi-gate Mixture-of-Experts (MMoE), or similar architectures optimized for multi-objective optimization
• Hands-on experience building sequential recommendation systems that capture real-time user session dynamics and long-term historical preferences
• Deep understanding of embedding generation, deep semantic retrieval, and multi-modal representation learning
• Mastery of Python and deep learning frameworks (TensorFlow, PyTorch) alongside hands-on experience with distributed computing (Spark, Ray) and cloud infrastructure (AWS/GCP)

Desired qualifications:

• Strong experience applying Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), knowledge graphs, or graph embeddings to map complex relations between entities
• Familiarity with Agentic AI frameworks, LLM-driven reasoning, or autonomous planning agents to enhance conversational search and automated generation systems
• Experience working in e-commerce, travel tech, or two-sided marketplaces, specifically handling non-linear user journeys and highly constrained inventory
• Strong track record of academic or industry contributions, including publications in top-tier AI/IR conferences (SIGIR, KDD, RecSys, NeurIPS) or open-source ML contributions

How We Work With You

Our talent team at Get A Job.ai will guide you through the entire process. When you apply through our platform, one of our experienced recruiters will screen your application and discuss the opportunity in detail. If there's a strong match, we will submit your profile to our client on your behalf.

Please do not contact the client directly. All communication and negotiation will be handled through Get A Job.ai to ensure the best outcome for your candidacy.

Pay

Compensation details will be discussed during the screening process with our recruitment team.

Equal Employment Opportunity: Get A Job.ai is committed to providing equal employment opportunities to all qualified applicants regardless of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, or any other protected characteristic. We celebrate diversity and are dedicated to creating an inclusive environment for all candidates.