Senior Director of Machine Learning (Experiences)

About Tripadvisor

The Tripadvisor Group connects people to experiences worth sharing and aims to be the worlds most trusted source for travel and experiences. We leverage our brands technology and capabilities to connect our global audience with partners through rich content travel guidance and two-sided marketplaces for experiences accommodations restaurants and other travel categories. The subsidiaries of Tripadvisor Inc. (Nasdaq: TRIP) include a portfolio of travel brands and businesses including Tripadvisor Viator and TheFork.

Tripadvisor Experiences a division of Tripadvisor is the leading marketplace for travel experiences. We believe that making memories is what travel is all about. And with 400000 travel experiences to exploreeverything from simple tours to extreme adventures (and all the niche interesting stuff in between)making memories that will last a lifetime has never been easier. With industry- leading flexibility and last-minute availability its never too late to make any day extraordinary.

The role

As the Senior Director Machine Learning you will spearhead our Machine Learning Data Science and Experimentation efforts reporting to the Vice President of Engineering. You will play a pivotal role in shaping our ML and AI strategy and ensuring we leverage our data assets to their full potential to drive growth and competitive advantage. This spans the personalization recommendation and ranking systems that power how travelers discover and book experiences; rigorous experimentation; and the responsible application of generative AI all built on our rich first-party data.

You will run your organization as a hub-and-spoke: a strong central team that owns talent craft standards career growth tooling and long-horizon ML strategy with scientists deployed close to the product areas they serve so delivery stays fast and grounded in real business context. You will be a strategic leader and a credible technologist: a player-coach who sets technical direction holds the scientific bar and stays close enough to the work to earn the trust of a demanding team. You will lead and grow the organization through a layer of managers as it scales.

What youll do

Leading through a team of managers and senior scientists you will:

• Build and lead a unified ML organization. Consolidate and grow ML scientists currently embedded across engineering into one hub-and-spoke model; define the operating model decision rights and service commitments so product areas keep momentum through the change.
• Own the personalization strategy. Set the technical direction for the recommendation ranking and search-relevance systems that personalize the traveler journey multi-objective ranking sequential and session-based recommenders embeddings and semantic retrieval and real-time features the models that drive discovery and conversion at scale.
• Lead data science and experimentation. Own predictive modeling causal inference and the experimentation platform and standards A/B testing guardrail metrics and rigorous measurement of incremental business impact as a decision-science partner to Product and the business championing a strong experimentation culture across the organization.
• Shape our generative-AI direction. Own the strategy for applying LLMs and generative AI across the Experiences product conversational trip planning retrieval-augmented generation grounded in our first-party reviews and content and automated content with rigorous evaluation to control quality and cost including agentic and LLM-driven experiences as this work scales.
• Grow develop and retain the team. Shape ML and data-science career ladders and dual technical/management tracks; partner with Talent Acquisition to attract and hire top-tier ML and data-science talent; calibrate hiring and promotions; establish standards for the research-to-production model lifecycle; and develop both the management track and the senior IC bench Staff and Principal Scientists.
• Own production ML health. Set and enforce the standards for reliable well-monitored cost-effective models in production - deployment retraining monitoring and governance - and the service levels (SLAs) of the ML organization. Partnering with MLOps infrastructure team.
• Partner across the company. Translate commercial strategy into an ML roadmap with Product Engineering Design and Analytics leadership; represent ML in executive planning; and connect model performance to business outcomes.

What youll bring:

• Substantial experience in machine learning together with significant experience leading managers and senior technical teams in a complex scaled organisation.
• A track record of shipping production machine learning at scale ideally personalization recommendations search/ranking or similar to large consumer traffic with measurable business impact.
• Experience building scaling or restructuring an ML or data-science organization and the change-management skill to consolidate and align teams without disrupting delivery.
• The ability to operate as an executive peer influencing Director- and VP-level partners across Product and Engineering and shaping strategy not just execution.
• A strategic player-coachs technical depth: current enough in modern ML experimentation and MLOps to set direction review architecture and hold the scientific bar.
• Strong grounding in experimentation and statistics A/B testing causal inference and rigorous measurement of impact.
• An MS or PhD in a quantitative field (Computer Science Statistics Mathematics or related) or equivalent depth of applied experience.
• Excellent communication the ability to translate complex ML concepts into business decisions for technical and non-technical audiences alike.

Job Location: Hybrid - UK (London/Oxford) or Poland (Krakow)

This role is a hybrid position that requires 2 days per week in our office

What We Offer

• Competitive compensation packages (routinely benchmarked against the latest industry data) including base salary and annual bonuses
• Work your way with flexibility to suit your lifestyle. Tripadvisor Group takes a remote-friendly approach to collaboration across a worldwide team with the option to join on-site as often as youd like or as required by your team.
• Flexible schedule. Work-life balance is ingrained in our culture by design. Trust and accountability make it work.
• Donation matching. Give back Give more! We match qualifying charitable donations annually.
• Tuition assistance. Want to level up your career We love to hear it! Receive annual support for qualified programs.
• Lifestyle benefit. An annual benefit to spend on yourself. Use it on travel wellness or whatever suits you.
• Travel perks. We believe that travel is employee development so we provide discounts and more.
• Employee assistance program. Were here for you with resources and programs to help you through lifes challenges.
• Health benefits. We offer great coverage and competitive premiums.
• Generous referral scheme. Help us grow and be rewarded with generous awards for referring successful candidates.

Our Cultural Pillars:

Traveler first

We exist to create value for our customer the traveler. We enable our suppliers and partners to unlock this value. Their collective behaviors and insights are what drives us.

Execution is our edge

We act fast experiment learn from failure iterate and improve the solutions of tomorrow across every aspect of our business. Our execution is agile data-driven prioritised and built to scale. We assume no problem is someone elses problem and finish what can be done today knowing tomorrow will bring fresh challenges.

We succeed together

The best outcomes are driven by empathic humble and diverse subject matter experts working toward shared goals. We collaborate relentlessly challenge assumptions give actionable feedback and set each other up for success through empowered teams with a clear charter. We transparently take ownership of our growth individually and as a team. We celebrate the quality of our effort our learnings and our collective achievements.

We strive to create an accessible and inclusive experience for all candidates. If you need a reasonable accommodation during the application or the recruiting process please make sure to reach out to your individual recruiter or our team at

If you have any additional questions about careers at Tripadvisor you can email us at We have all the answers!

#LI-AH1