Machine Learning Scientist

Hostelworld Group, the global hostel-focussed online booking platform, inspires adventurous minds to meet the world and come back with life-changing stories to tell. Our customers are not your average tourists, they crave cultural connection and unique experiences that we make possible by providing an unbeatable selection of hostels in unmissable locations – all in the palm of their hand.

It is the social nature and community feel of hostels and their environment, that enable travellers to embrace journeys of discovery, adventure and meaning. We have more than 13 million reviews across 17,800 hostels in more than 179 countries, making the brand the leading online hub for social travel. The website operates in 19 different languages and our mobile app in 13 languages.

Founded in 1999 and headquartered in Dublin, Hostelworld has a growing, high-calibre team of 230 people within Technology, Product, Global Markets, HR, Finance & Legal and Marketing Teams across our Dublin, London, Porto, Shanghai and Sydney offices. Hostelworld is listed on the London Stock Exchange and Dublin Euronext.

ABOUT US

Hostelworld Group, the global hostel-focussed online booking platform, inspires adventurous minds to meet the world and come back with life-changing stories to tell. Our customers are not your average tourists, they crave cultural connection and unique experiences that we make possible by providing an unbeatable selection of hostels in unmissable locations – all in the palm of their hand.

It is the social nature and community feel of hostels and their environment, that enable travellers to embrace journeys of discovery, adventure and meaning. We have more than 13 million reviews across 17,800 hostels in more than 179 countries, making the brand the leading online hub for social travel. The website operates in 19 different languages and our mobile app in 13 languages.

Founded in 1999 and headquartered in Dublin, Hostelworld has a growing, high-calibre team of 230 people within Technology, Product, Global Markets, HR, Finance & Legal and Marketing Teams across our Dublin, London, Porto, Shanghai and Sydney offices. Hostelworld is listed on the London Stock Exchange and Dublin Euronext. You can read more about our story here.

LOCATION

This role is based in Portugal. We have an office hub in Porto available for those who prefer a hybrid model where you can spend time with colleagues in-person. You will need to be able to commute to our office hub as required from time to time.

THE ROLE & THE TEAM ‍ ‍

During 2020, Hostelworld pivoted from a more traditional functional CMO/CPO/CTO organisation to a ‘full ownership” growth team plus platform team model. More specifically, we established four growth teams to cover all consumer /hostel facing Apps and channels that reported into the CPO; and a separate CTO organisation that became responsible for supplying and maintaining common core services (such as inventory pricing, availability and checkout) via APIs to these four growth teams. Each of these four growth teams comprise resources that report into the CPO and dedicated resources drawn from the engineering function (developers, QA resources) and analytics function. Collectively, these four growth teams comprise ~ 50 headcount and are wholly accountable for their KPIs and roadmaps

We currently have four growth teams and four further central/support teams as follows;

• Paid performance team : responsible for growing and optimising our paid web channels, including (web) landing page optimisation
• Core team : responsible for our progressive web app (PWA Website), our organic web channels such as SEO, and more generally our core OTA funnel performance
• Mobile/Social team : responsible for our iOS and Android Apps, including paid and organic downloads, CRM strategy and more generally our social network and event management (LinkUps) platforms
• Supply team : responsible for all our hostel facing platforms and tools, supporting our two sided marketplace through collaboration with our customer facing teams and leading on our inventory, availability and rates position[LR1]
• Product Design (Central) team : responsible for defining and implementing a uniform User Interface/Experience design language across our consumer and supplier facing Apps, consistent with our Mission and Brand
• Content and Creative (Central) team : responsible for defining and leading the creative direction for Hostelworld, delivering content primarily through the four Growth teams above but also supporting the wider business needs with copywriting, content writing, graphic design and video production assets
• Product and Technology Operations (Central) team : primarily responsible for driving alignment and coordination across the Growth and Technology teams quarterly roadmap planning process; and managing vendor spend across these two teams which accounts for the vast majority of non Wages and Salaries expenditure across the company
• Customer Service (Support) team : responsible for handling all consumer support queries, mostly via webform/chat and email across 19 languages.

WHAT YOU'LL DO ‍

Stakeholder Collaboration:

• Partner with business leaders to identify opportunities for leveraging data science to solve business problems
• Work closely with product teams to implement requirements and with engineering to implement algorithms and ETLs.
• Coordinate with stakeholders and provide timely deliver

Technical Expertise:

• Work closely with a team of machine learning engineers, data engineers and other data scientists to develop best in class search and ranking algorithms

Performance and Impact:

• Monitor data product performance and business impact and act accordingly when objectives are not met
• Develop comprehensive diagnostic approaches, a/b testing plans and scalable, repeatable best practices for our data science product development and roll out processes

WHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR

• MSc or PhD in a quantitative field such as Computer Science, Statistics, Mathematics, Economics or related field with a preference for a specialization in machine learning or data science
• 2 years minimum work experience in a commercial environment.
• 2-5 years’ experience as data scientist in a digital product environment, ideally ecommerce or two sided marketplace, developing & deploying successful ranking and recommendation algorithms through.
• Experience across all machine learning workstreams: using large data sets, model development, feature engineering, statistics, experimentation, data visualization, optimization, software development.
• Mastery of experimental design, A/B testing, and evaluation metrics for ML models.
• Strong skills in Python and in a selection of machine learning libraries (Keras, NumPy, Pandas, Hugging Face), deep learning frameworks (TensorFlow, PyTorch), and big data query languages (Scala, Spark)
• Experience conducting exploratory data analysis to understand user search behaviour, data distributions, trends, and potential challenges.
• Experience with cloud frameworks like VertexAI.
• Experience with streaming or other dynamic data.

WHAT WE OFFER

• Competitive salary & benefits 
• Enhanced annual leave plus 3 Wellbeing Days per year 
• Paid family leave (maternity, paternity, surrogacy & adoption) 
• Agile working (plus a Working from Abroad Policy!) 
• Support for your ongoing growth & development 
• Inclusive people policies (sickness, menopause, compassionate and fertility leave) 
• A chance to give back to your local community with 5 paid volunteering days

OUR BEHAVIOURS

• Grow others - We fundamentally believe that investing in growing others benefits everyone, whether it's helping them develop hard or soft skills. We want learning and growing to be part of our DNA to help makes us a better team, together.
• Master it - We are obsessed with our area of expertise and enjoy developing our skills. We rarely take things at face value; we investigate, interrogate, and always look for ‘the why,’ and wherever possible, we use data to find the best solution.
• Collaborate - We are in it together, for the tough stuff and the celebrations too. To achieve the best results, we need expertise from all areas of the organisation, and we wholeheartedly welcome diverse thinking.
• Adapt - We work fluidly, adapting to new information and the evolving environment while staying committed to our goals. Innovation and experimentation fuel our projects and we’re never afraid to pivot.
• Deliver - Our focus is always on the end result; we value outcomes over activity. We collaborate to deliver work at speed without dropping any of our other behaviours.

We believe in talented and diverse teams that reflect the diversity of our customers and the communities in which we operate. Everyone brings different perspectives and experiences. We lay out the above requirements to guide applicants to the experiences that we believe will allow you to be successful in the role. If you don’t meet them all, please consider applying if you think you can still perform the role as described.