Senior Data Scientist

About Us: At Booking.com, data drives our decisions. Technology is at our core. And innovation is everywhere. But our company is more than datasets, lines of code or A/B tests. We're the thrill of the first night in a new place. The excitement of the next morning. The friends you encounter. The journeys you take. The sights you see. And the memories you make. Through our products, partners and people, we make it easier for everyone to experience the world.

About the team: The Digital Media Analytics team in Growth Marketing unites analysts, data scientists, and engineers to measure, report, and optimize paid media across channels like YouTube, Facebook, and Criteo using an incrementality-first approach with holdout/control tests. They translate causal results into automated pipelines and clear dashboards for daily decisions, and run an experimentation program that standardizes hypotheses, KPIs, power/duration, and effort scoring for transparent planning and robust readouts.

Role description: As a Senior Data Scientist in the Digital Media Analytics Team, you focus on scalable solutions and frameworks to the company's most persistent challenges in decision making. You provide support to experimenters and business leaders across the company, investigate problems and define clear solutions and requirements for their implementation. You will build proofs of concept and prototypes, and work closely with the engineering teams to support our product vision. The ability to write high quality, reproducible code, dig into technical product details for feasible and robust solutions is crucial to make your work impactfully landed in the Experimentation Tool, and enable solid decision making adoptable by a wide range of experimenters and leadership!

Senior Data Scientist defines the strategy and vision in the area, driving them from ideation to full productionisation. They autonomously prioritize and solve impactful strategic business problems using suitable data analysis and modeling methods. Senior Data Scientists handle key projects within their team, delivering work that influences business decisions across multiple products. They design and interpret quantitative experiments, driving long-term strategic business decisions. They independently manage a range of stakeholders, including senior managers and director roles, and maintain effective communication. As subject matter experts in a specific area of data science, they play a vital role as a go-to authority for senior business stakeholders, influence business decisions within their wider area, and contribute significantly to the community through coaching, mentoring, and community projects.

Key Job Responsibilities and Duties

• Responsible for defining the strategy and vision for generating impact in the department by leveraging data science solutions and driving them from ideation to prototyping to full productionisation.
• Responsible for proactively identifying and autonomously prioritizing impactful strategic business problems, translating them into data stories and solving them effectively by applying suitable statistical data analysis and modeling methods. Leverages input from product stakeholders in all of the above to determine the right technical solutions to deliver customer value. May seek guidance from the manager on complex business problems.
• Responsible for designing and interpreting quantitative experiments to objectively drive long-term strategic business decision making.
• Responsible for autonomously identifying and managing a broad range of stakeholders, from operational team members to directors . Maintains effective communication, addresses stakeholder needs, and conveys complex analysis results clearly. Continues to guide less experienced colleagues in all of the above, but may seek guidance from the manager in complex situations with senior stakeholders.
• Responsible for exploring and modifying existing internal and external Data Science approaches. Makes these solutions reusable by designing for easy adoption and proactively educating and upskilling peers on how to effectively utilize these solutions in their work.
• Responsible for incorporating scalability, reproducibility and long term orientation in the work they do. Regularly sharing best practices with peers in their area.
• Responsible for acting as a force multiplier for peers in their area by actively helping them with their craft through means of coaching, mentoring and setting a good example.
• Responsible for contributing significantly to the community of their area by thinking of and implementing ways to make other data professionals more effective (ie. group trainings, community projects), actively participating in community strengthening activities (ie. recruitment) and connecting their area to the rest of the business.
• Responsible for proactively collaborating with peers in related crafts (ie. Data Engineering) on all projects owned by their team, anticipating data needs to maintain smooth execution of projects.
• Responsible for having significant deep knowledge about the operational, tactical and strategic goals of their area (ie. track / vertical) and be knowledgeable of the goals of their wider area (ie. Business Unit).

• A minimum of 8 years of professional experience as a Data Scientist, preferably in software, product or e-commerce environments
• Fluent in Pyspark and general Python
• Strong working knowledge of statistical and hypothesis testing
• Strong commercial awareness with an ability to understand the business implications of a certain solution while being able to communicate that to stakeholders from various levels
• Experience working closely with product teams (not just PMs, but directly with developers/engineers)
• Willingness to dig deep into problems and behind the scenes data to support troubleshooting/bug fixing
• Solution oriented and result driven, strong bias for actions instead of perfect solutions and willingness to work on the most pressing challenges even when they don't sound advanced enough.
• Able to brainstorm, peer review and drive research topics benefit Experimentation and Decision Making in both short and long term
• Excellent English communication skills, both written and verbal; the ability to convey your message to team members and other stakeholders, clearly and gently.
• Achieve impacts as a team player, and maintain solid relationships with technical and non technical stakeholders.
• Understand the complexity of experimentation from both craft and product perspectives, and how to effectively drive scalable solutions for continuous improvements.

• Knowledgeable about statistical properties of (good) metrics, and ability to scalably test them
• Causal inference knowledge beyond A/B testing
• Understand the gist of scripts written in R
• Experience building libraries/modules in python
• Familiarity with apis using is good, building/maintaining is great
• Good understanding of fundamental machine learning concepts
• Strong knowledge of reporting/visualization techniques (e.g., Tableau, Graphite, Power BI, etc.)
• The senior might be required at times to provide reporting and dashboarding

• Annual paid time off and generous paid leave scheme including: parent, grandparent, bereavement, and care leave
• Hybrid working including flexible working arrangements, and up to 20 days per year working from abroad (home country)
• Industry leading product discounts - up to 1400 per year - for yourself, including automatic Genius Level 3 status and Booking.com wallet credit
• Living and working in Amsterdam, one of the most cosmopolitan cities in Europe
• Contributing to a high scale, complex, world renowned product and seeing real-time impact of your work on millions of travelers worldwide
• Working in a fast-paced and performance driven culture
• Opportunity to utilize technical expertise, leadership capabilities and entrepreneurial spirit
• Promote and drive impactful and innovative engineering solutions
• Technical, behavioral and interpersonal competence advancement via on-the-job opportunities, experimental projects, hackathons, conferences and active community participation
• Competitive compensation and benefits package and some great added perks of working in the home city of Booking.com

• Let's go places together: How we Hire
• This role does not come with relocation assistance.