Senior Data Scientist, Revenue Management Systems

Senior Data Scientist Revenue Management Systems

Job Summary:

Viking is scaling its Revenue Management System (RMS) from a successful MVP to full inventory coverage and sustained yield uplift. This role serves as the handson technical lead for the RMS analytics engine owning the suite of machinelearning models setting methodological direction and making pragmatic decisions about when to use (or not use) ML.

The Lead Data Scientist sits embedded with the Yield team (business) while partnering daily with Technology (data engineering frontend MLOps) to ensure the RMS remains stable fast explainable and tightly aligned with business needs.

This is a hybrid position based in our Woodland Hills CA office. You will be required to adhere to our hybrid work policy working from our office Monday and Thursday plus one additional weekday on a weekly basis.

Job Responsibilities:

• Own the RMS analytics engine endtoend: demand forecasting cancellations price optimization and recommendation logicincluding data prep training validation deployment monitoring documentation and ontime retrains.
• Improve reliability coherence and trust: by refining constraints features guardrails and business rules; reducing edgecase behaviors; strengthening monitoring drift detection and recovery playbooks; and improving model response times.
• Drive adoption and business impact: by partnering with Yield and FrontEnd to expand RMSmanaged sailing coverage ensure outputs are actionable in the tool and track yield uplift versus control.
• Lead highvalue experimentation: by defining hypotheses offline evaluation frameworks (IPS/DR) shadow tests guardrails and safe onpolicy trials; promote winning changes to production with rollback plans.
• Embed with Yield stakeholders: to translate pricing and inventory strategy into model logic and constraints explain drivers of recommendations and present results in clear business terms.
• Ensure strong production hygiene & MLOps: in partnership with Data Engineering/DevOps including CI/CD pipeline health retraining orchestration versioning and featurestore usage.
• Champion pragmatic rightsized solutions:using rules SQL or heuristics where signal latency governance or explainability make ML unsuitable.
• Strengthen explainability & documentation: by upgrading careandfeeding guides methodology docs and analyst manuals lead knowledge transfer as external support tapers.

Success Metrics:

• Coverage: Increasing percentage of sailings pricemanaged by RMS quarteroverquarter.
• Yield Uplift: Stable measurable uplift vs. control groups with welldocumented drivers and explainers.
• Quality & Speed: Reduction in edgecase incidents improved model response times increased analyst trust and recommendation acceptance rates.
• Operational Hygiene: Ontime retrains green pipeline SLAs and zero critical incidents attributable to model logic.

Job Requirements:

• 6 years of experience delivering productiongrade commercially impactful ML solutions.
• Preferred experience in pricing forecasting or inventory optimization within travel or hospitality.
• Expert proficiency in Python SQL Spark Databricks and production ML practices (versioning feature stores monitoring CI/CD).
• Strong foundation in constrained optimization experimental design timeseries modeling causal inference and interpretable ML techniques.
• Demonstrated success shipping ML features into userfacing tools and collaborating with business owners.
• Exceptional communication skills with the ability to explain complex concepts simply and defend methodological choices.

What We Offer You:

• Highly competitive compensation plan.
• Salary range $200000-$220000 annually determined by a myriad of factors including but not limited to years of experience depth of experience and other relevant business considerations.
• Employees are eligible for annual discretionary bonus.
• 401(k) plan with company match.
• Employee Share Purchase Plan (ESPP) Viking full-time regular employees working in the United States can purchase Viking shares through payroll deductions.
• Full benefits including medical dental vision life and disability insurance at a highly subsidized rate (some plans are fully paid by Viking).
• Accrue 15 paid vacation days sick time accrual by state and 6 paid holidays per year.
• Opportunity to take a free and/or discounted cruise.
• Highly subsidized gym membership.
• Discounts on theatres theme parks movie tickets travel discounts through IATA membership and too many more discounts to name.

Viking is a certified Great Place to Work company. This certification is a result of our commitment to excellence integrity and our teams outstanding contributions.

About Viking

Viking was founded in 1997 and provides destination-focused voyages on oceans rivers and lakes around the world. Designed for experienced travelers with interests in science history culture and cuisine Chairman Torstein Hagen often says Viking offers experiences for The Thinking Person.

Viking has more than 250 awards to its name including being rated #1 for Rivers #1 for Oceans and #1 for Expeditions by Condé Nast Traveler and voted at the top of its categories by Travel Leisure. No other cruise line has ever received these same honors by both publications at the same time.