Lead/Principal Data Scientist

About Agoda At Agoda, we bridge the world through travel. Our story began in 2005, when two lifelong friends and entrepreneurs, driven by their passion for travel, launched Agoda to make it easier for everyone to explore the world. Today, we are part of Booking Holdings [NASDAQ: BKNG], with a diverse team of over 7,000 people from 90 countries, working together in offices around the globe. Every day, we connect people to destinations and experiences, with our great deals across our millions of hotels and holiday properties, flights, and experiences worldwide. No two days are the same at Agoda. Data and technology are at the heart of our culture, fueling our curiosity and innovation. If you’re ready to begin your best journey and help build travel for the world, join us. Planning a trip can feel like a second job. Agodaʼs AI Assistant turns a loose travel idea into a personalized, actionable trip plan across hotels, flights, and activities. Weʼre hiring Lead/Principal Data Scientists to own how it understands, plans, recommends, and improves. Get To Know Our Team Youʼll join the team building Agodaʼs AI Assistant: The assistant runs on Agodaʼs live inventory of 6M+ properties, 130K+ flight routes and 300K+ activities, so your work can directly shape the options and decisions travelers see in live booking journeys. Weʼre early enough that the big design decisions are still open, and youʼll make many of them. The role suits senior data scientists and ML practitioners who want end-to-end responsibility for complex systems, where ML, product and engineering meet What You'll Do • Own the assistantʼs core intelligence: intent understanding, multi-step trip planning, memory, and tool calls into Agodaʼs search. • Build the evaluation backbone: offline evaluations, LLM-as-judge calibrated against human labels, and A/B tests, so we know a change is better before travelers see it. • Make the hard trade-offs with data: use data to make hard trade-offs among quality, latency, cost, and reliability, in partnership with product, engineering, and leadership. • Ship, learn, repeat: get ideas into production fast and let usage tell you what to fix next. • Raise the bar: set technical direction and DS practices for building and evaluating agents, and mentor other data scientists What We're Looking For • Strong DS fundamentals: Modeling, statistics, experimentation and causal inference. • Hands-on experience building LLM systems: RAG, tool use, agent orchestration, context and memory, with an evaluation-first approach. • Problem-solving mindset: Excellent analytical and problem-solving skills, with comfort operating in open-ended problem spaces where requirements evolve. • Deep LLM experience is valuable: but exceptional DS/ML depth, strong product judgment, and the ability to ramp quickly are equally important. Why This Role • Meaningful user impact: Help millions of travelers make better, more confident decisions for trips that matter to them. • High ownership, high impact: Your work will shape a customer-facing system operating in real travel and booking journeys. • Direct influence: Play a key role in both implementation and product direction. Nice to Have • Experience in online travel, e-commerce, search, ranking, recommendations, pricing, or personalization. • Experience with production LLM or generative-AI systems. • Advanced degree in Computer Science, Statistics, Operations Research, Mathematics, or a related field. If youʼre excited about building real-world AI products at scale and owning systems that directly impact millions of travelers, weʼd love to hear from you! Please review our Hiring Process Guidelines before your interview — click here to learn how interviewing at Agoda works. Discover more about working at Agoda • Agoda Careers https://careersatagoda.com • Facebook https://www.facebook.com/agodacareers/ • LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/agoda • YouTube https://www.youtube.com/agodalife Equal Opportunity Employer At Agoda, we pride ourselves on being a company represented by people of all different backgrounds and orientations. We prioritize attracting diverse talent and cultivating an inclusive environment that encourages collaboration and innovation. Employment at Agoda is based solely on a person’s merit and qualifications. We are committed to providing equal employment opportunity regardless of sex, age, race, color, national origin, religion, marital status, pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, citizenship, veteran or military status, and other legally protected characteristics. We will keep your application on file so that we can consider you for future vacancies and you can always ask to have your details removed from the file. For more details please read our privacy policy. Disclaimer We do not accept any terms or conditions, nor do we recognize any agency’s representation of a candidate, from unsolicited third-party or agency submissions. If we receive unsolicited or speculative CVs, we reserve the right to contact and hire the candidate directly without any obligation to pay a recruitment fee.