Senior Data Scientist

As a senior member of our Data Science group, you’ll be responsible for leading the design, development, and deployment of cutting-edge machine learning algorithms that power our next-gen travel fintech and e-commerce experiences. Your focus will span across recommender systems, ranking/re-ranking models, user and item embeddings, and causal inference techniques, all tailored to deliver hyper-personalized, real-time interactions to our users.

This role is deeply technical and highly collaborative you’ll work alongside product managers, business stakeholders, revenue leaders, and engineering teams to bring innovative ideas to life through robust, scalable ML systems. You’ll also play a key role in mentoring junior data scientists and ML engineers, fostering a culture of research, rigor, and experimentation.

Experience. 7 – 11 years

Key Responsibilities

1. End-to-End Model Ownership. Design, build, train, and deploy state-of-the-art machine learning and deep learning models for product recommendation, pricing, personalization, and user engagement optimization.
2. Multi-Objective Optimization. Develop recommendation algorithms under real-world constraints (revenue vs. experience, exploration vs. exploitation, etc.) and evaluate trade-offs using both qualitative and quantitative methods.
3. Data-Driven Collaboration. Partner closely with cross-functional teams to deeply understand user journeys, define problem statements, align on KPIs, set up A/B testing frameworks, and iterate on model improvements based on empirical results.
4. Platform & Infrastructure Ownership. Upgrade and maintain our ML infrastructure, including data pipelines, feature stores, model deployment pipelines, monitoring dashboards, and low-latency APIs that serve personalized recommendations at scale.
5. Mentorship & Leadership. Guide and mentor junior team members through code reviews, design discussions, and collaborative problem-solving. Help grow a high-performance, impact-driven data science culture.
6. Intellectual Property Creation. Explore opportunities to develop proprietary models and data-driven product moats for travel e-commerce, especially for Bharat (Tier 2/3 India) customers, by leveraging domain insights and research.

Desired Skills & Expertise

1. Expertise in ML/DL for Recommendations. Deep understanding of ranking/re-ranking algorithms, collaborative filtering, matrix factorization, and deep learning-based RecSys architectures (e.g., two-tower models, attention mechanisms, transformer-based recommenders).
2. Proficiency in Representation Learning. Hands-on experience in learning dense representations of users, sessions, and items from behavioral, contextual, and content-based data.
3. Experience with Tabular & Sequential Models. Ability to build and fine-tune deep learning models using PyTorch or TensorFlow for tabular and sequence-based data, including clickstream and transactional logs.
4. Strong Analytical Rigor. Skilled in SQL and Python for exploratory data analysis, feature engineering, and root-cause diagnosis of model errors and metric deviations.
5. A/B Testing and Experimentation. Experience designing experiments, analyzing treatment effects, and translating model gains into measurable business impact.
6. Familiarity with Causal & Bandit Methods. Exposure to contextual bandits, multi-armed bandits, reinforcement learning, or other online learning techniques is a significant advantage.
7. GenAI for DS Ops (Bonus). Experience with applying generative AI to streamline data science workflows, feature discovery, or model documentation will be considered a plus.
8. Engineering for Scale. Proven track record of deploying ML systems in high-traffic environments with strict SLA (99%+ availability) and latency requirements.
9. Strong Fundamentals. Solid grounding in probability, statistics, linear algebra, optimization, and applied machine learning.

Educational Background

• Bachelor's degree (BE/BTech) in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Mathematics, or equivalent, preferably from Tier 1 institutions (IITs, NITs, IISc, IIIT).
• Master’s (MS/MTech) or PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, or a related technical field is highly preferred.

What We Offer

1. Impact at Scale. Your work will touch millions of users and directly influence their travel experience.
2. Intellectual Challenge. Work on real-world data science problems that push the boundaries of ML research and practical engineering.
3. Collaborative Culture. A vibrant, inclusive team with a deep passion for technology and customer obsession.
4. Ownership & Growth. Flat structure, transparent communication, and freedom to innovate we trust you to drive change.
5. Work with the Best. Learn from industry-leading experts and contribute to building next-gen ML platforms in travel fintech.

If you're someone who thrives at the intersection of research, engineering, and product and is excited about building the future of travel using AI we’d love to hear from you.

Join us at MakeMyTrip-GoIbibo and help shape journeys that matter.