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Tripadvisor Experiences is seeking a Senior Director of Machine Learning to lead the ML, Data Science, and Experimentation organization across the travel experiences marketplace. Reporting to the VP of Engineering, you will spearhead strategy for personalization, recommendations, ranking, and generative AI applications that power how 400,000+ travel experiences are discovered and booked.
You will operate a hub-and-spoke model: a central team owning talent development, technical standards, career growth, and long-horizon ML strategy, with scientists embedded in product areas to maintain delivery velocity and business context. As a player-coach, you will set technical direction, maintain scientific rigor, and lead through a layer of managers as the organization scales.
Key responsibilities include: consolidating ML scientists currently embedded across engineering into a unified organization; owning the technical direction for recommendation, ranking, search-relevance, and personalization systems; leading data science and experimentation as a decision-science partner to Product; shaping the strategy for LLMs and generative AI across the platform (conversational trip planning, RAG, automated content); growing and developing the team through dual technical and management career tracks; establishing production ML health standards and SLAs; and translating commercial strategy into an ML roadmap in partnership with Product, Engineering, Design, and Analytics leadership.
You bring substantial ML experience with a proven track record of shipping production machine learning at scale—ideally in personalization, recommendations, or search/ranking—to large consumer traffic with measurable business impact. You have experience building, scaling, or restructuring ML/data-science organizations with strong change-management skills. You operate as an executive peer, influencing Director- and VP-level partners across functions, and combine deep technical credibility with strategic business acumen.
