Director, Machine Learning Engineering

Are you a leader who embraces servant leader principles? Are passionate about technology and leadership in equal measures? Do you relish the challenge of working in a large scale and fast-moving technology company leading teammates around the world? Are you fascinated by data and AI and building robust machine learning products which process massive amounts of data at scale and speed to provide crucial insights to the end customer?

This is exactly what we, the Machine Learning Engineering group in Expedia, do. Our mission is to partner with our Machine Learning Science counterparts to use AI/ML to collaboratively transform Expedia’s data assets into intelligent and real-time insights for our customers. We work on creating AI services and deploying machine learning models and products to support a variety of applications which are used by 1000+ market managers, analysts, our supply partners and our travelers. Our work spans across a variety of datasets and ML models and across a diverse technology stack ranging from Spark, Sagemaker, Airflow, Databricks, Kubernetes, AWS and much more!

What you’ll do:

This role will be a key leader to successfully deliver AI engines, services, and products so that they can add value to the millions of travelers and partners using the Expedia Group Travel Platform. This candidate will also drive the next wave of growth ensuring that AI engines and services are built natively onto the EG platform, defining, and implementing best practices, leading and motivating highly skilled ML engineers and joining the wider AI & ML leadership team to build stronger links with Machine Learning scientists, product managers and engineers across the company.

• You can identify the interrelatedness of work activities across teams and recommend improvements to processes to increase effectiveness.
• You can ensure process improvement initiatives focus on measurable results, and help teams establish measures of success.

• You will manage and lead the product development lifecycle to reduce time to market, improve product quality and ensure product success.

• You will support and inform EG leaders via a community of practice and product reviews.
• You will build relationships with leaders across the organization to understand business problems and apply a technology lens to solve them.

• You will identify areas for improvement and develop innovative enhancements using available software development tools following design requirements of customer.
• You will advocate for designing scalable, resilient, and stable software.

• You will partner with the business to integrate new technologies into business solutions. Create and communicate a vision of the technology requirements for the future state of the business.
• You will follow industry trends in machine learning engineering and data science and make practical recommendations for improvements.

• You will present work for upcoming planned efforts and calculate risks and opportunities associated with those efforts.

• You will create contingency resource plans to ensure continuity of work processes in the face of a delay or shortage in financial/material resources.
• You will recognize and reward appropriate resource utilization and creative suggestions to gain efficiency in resource usage.

• You will facilitate cross-team and cross-divisional movement of talent as a tool for building skills, capabilities and creating visibility to talent.
• You will identify team educational and training needs by developing programs or recruiting specialists to meet those training needs.

• You will hold self and team accountable for setting and meeting departmental goals and identify and resolve issues that may impair the team’s ability to meet strategic, financial, and technical goals.
• You will help team members identify and build key relationships and networks inside and outside the organization by encouraging and gaining the commitment of others towards the vision, mission, values, and organizational goals.
• You will shape the open, collaborative, and candid culture of the organization by building team and organizational rituals, processes and practices that build strong team bonds.
• You will create an open, trusting environment where diverse viewpoints, opinions, approaches, candid conversations, and critiques can happen.

Who You Are:

• Bachelor’s, Master’s, or Equivalent Experience; Technical degree or relevant experience is applicable.
• Relevant Experience:
  • Managed at least 2 people managers.
  • Executed capacity planning/allocation for teams of 30 or more.
  • Drove a multi-year machine learning project roadmap/program.
  • Built strategy for a multi-product, cross-functional program, which includes data science and machine learning engineering.
• Responsible for choices recommended in team and applies across teams which involve several technologies.
• Responsible for several technical domains.
• Presents new technology choice to technical and non-technical observers.
• Guides others to make well defined technology choices.
• Mentors team members and managers.
• Defines team’s goals to solve a business need across entire business unit.
• Delivers solutions to business problems spanning business unit.
• Influences and delivers across multiple teams spanning business unit, working in collaboration with product team.

• Preferred:
  • Experience on machine learning toolkits like Spark Mllib, H20, scikit-learn, R and ML techniques.
  • Experience leading machine learning engineering team
  • Experience building low latency, resilient and scalable services
  • Knowledge of cloud technologies specifically AWS
  • Knowledge of machine learning platforms such as Databricks, Sagemaker etc.
  • Knowledge of Spark, Airflow, Kubernetes, big data technologies.

About Expedia Group
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About Expedia Group

Expedia Group (NASDAQ: EXPE) powers travel for everyone, everywhere through our global platform. Driven by the core belief that travel is a force for good, we help people experience the world in new ways and build lasting connections. We provide industry-leading technology solutions to fuel partner growth and success, while facilitating memorable experiences for travelers. Expedia Group’s family of brands includes: Brand Expedia®, Hotels.com®, Expedia® Partner Solutions, Vrbo®, trivago®, Orbitz®, Travelocity®, Hotwire®, Wotif®, ebookers®, CheapTickets®, Expedia Group™ Media Solutions, Expedia Local Expert®, CarRentals.com™, and Expedia Cruises™.

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