Director of AI & Insights Platforms

Role Description

About Booking.com

Established in 1996 in Amsterdam, Booking.com has grown from a small Dutch start-up to one of the largest ecommerce companies in the world. Booking.com is the largest business within Booking Holdings (NASDAQ: BKNG) and accounts for the vast majority of Booking Holdings’ total revenue. Booking Holdings is a leading Fortune 500 e-commerce conglomerate with a market cap of roughly $166 Billion (2025). Booking.com currently employs approximately 12,000 employees in 140 offices in 70 countries worldwide.

With a mission to make it easier for everyone to experience the world, Booking.com invests in digital technology that helps take the friction out of travel. Booking.com connects travelers with the world’s largest selection of incredible places to stay, including everything from apartments, vacation homes, and family-run B&Bs to 5-star luxury resorts and even tree houses. The Booking.com website and mobile apps are available in over 44 languages, offer more than 28M total reported listings, and cover over 174,000 destinations in 229 countries worldwide. Offering 30 different types of places to stay, including homes, apartments, B&Bs, hostels, farm stays, bungalows, even boats, igloos, and treehouses. So whether travelling for business or leisure, customers can instantly book their ideal accommodation quickly and easily, without booking fees and backed up by its promise to price match. Via the customer experience team, customers can reach Booking.com 24/7 for assistance and support in over 44 languages, any time of the day or night. 

At Booking.com, we are all involved in making hundreds of decisions every day. The decisions we make are a reflection of our Values - they reflect what is important to us, both as individuals and as an organisation. 

When Values are made explicit, they provide clarity on what “good” looks like. And when they are shared, they build unity in a group. They build culture.

• Think customer first. We obsess about adding value for our customers - guests, partners, colleagues - to make it easier for everyone to experience the world.

• Own it. We deliver on our promises, make informed decisions and prioritize to get the important things done today.

• Learn forever. We are resilient, take time to reflect, and seek to learn – from colleagues, from the outside world and from our failures.

• Succeed together. We celebrate team success, through making connections, building trust and valuing the diverse perspectives of others.

• Do the right thing. We get the right results the right way. For each other, our communities and the world around us.

About the position of Director of AI & Insights Platforms 

Booking.com’s Data & Machine Learning Department are building the foundations that allow the company to turn data into better customer experiences, stronger business decisions and responsible innovation at scale. The organisation provides the platforms through which data is produced, ingested, stored, discovered, governed, accessed and consumed across Booking.com, supporting data engineering, analytics, machine learning, AI and operational use cases.

As Director for AI and Insights Platforms, you will define and lead the technology strategy for a portfolio of platforms used by data scientists, machine learning engineers, analytics practitioners, product teams and business stakeholders. These capabilities may span experimentation and measurement, analytical and feature platforms, model development and deployment, AI application foundations, workflow orchestration, observability, model and data quality, and the developer experiences that allow practitioners to move efficiently from exploration to production. Your mandate is to create a coherent platform ecosystem that turns complex technical capabilities into dependable, self-service products for the people who use them.

A defining part of the role is connecting engineering execution with the needs of the wider organisation. You will partner closely with the VP Data & Machine Learning, Product, Data Science, Data Engineering, AI and ML leaders, Business Units, Security, Privacy, Legal, Risk and Control, Data and AI Governance, and Central Technology. Together, you will translate business opportunities, research advances, operational needs and regulatory expectations into clear platform roadmaps and durable engineering capabilities. You will create alignment across a federated organisation, balancing reusable enterprise foundations with the flexibility required by teams solving domain-specific problems.

The platforms under your leadership will serve a demanding internal customer base. Practitioners need fast, intuitive and powerful tools that let them develop, evaluate, deploy and operate models and analytical products with confidence. Product and business leaders need insights and AI capabilities that are explainable, measurable and connected to outcomes. Governance, privacy, security and compliance stakeholders need appropriate controls, traceability and evidence throughout the lifecycle. Success will therefore require more than technical excellence: it will require strong product thinking, empathy for users, commercial judgement and the ability to make sophisticated technology accessible without compromising safety or quality.

You will be responsible for setting the direction, building the organisation and creating the conditions for sustained delivery. This includes developing senior engineering managers, attracting and retaining exceptional technical talent, establishing an effective operating model, and ensuring that roadmaps, budgets and capacity are aligned to Booking.com’s strategic priorities. You will foster a culture in which teams own outcomes end to end, apply strong engineering craftsmanship, operate what they build and continuously improve the reliability, usability, performance and business impact of the platforms they provide.

This is an opportunity to shape one of Booking.com’s most important enterprise capabilities. By combining deep engineering leadership with platform, product and AI expertise, you will help Booking.com scale the use of analytics, machine learning and AI responsibly—accelerating innovation and improving the experiences of customers, partners and employees.

Key responsibilities

• Set the technology strategy for AI and Insights platforms covering experimentation, measurement, analytical and feature platforms, model development and deployment, AI application foundations, orchestration, observability, and data/model quality.  

• Create a coherent platform ecosystem that provides dependable, self-service products for data scientists, ML engineers, analysts, product teams and business stakeholders.  

• Translate business opportunities, research advances, operational needs and regulatory expectations into durable platform roadmaps and engineering capabilities.  

• Align a federated organisation, balancing reusable enterprise foundations with domain-specific flexibility.  

• Partner across Data & ML, Product, Engineering, AI/ML, Security, Privacy, Legal, Risk, Governance and business teams.

• Build and lead the organisation: develop senior engineering managers, attract and retain technical talent, establish the operating model, and align roadmaps, budgets and capacity to strategic priorities.  

• Drive end-to-end ownership and operational excellence, improving reliability, usability, performance and measurable business impact.  

Key skills and experience

• Deep expertise in AI/ML platforms, data platforms, analytics, experimentation and MLOps.

• Strong understanding of model development, deployment, monitoring, orchestration and data/model quality.  

• Platform-product thinking: turning complex technical capabilities into intuitive, scalable self-service products.

• Strong strategic and organisational leadership, including roadmaps, investment choices, talent development and operating-model design.  

• Excellent cross-functional influence and communication across technical, product, governance, risk and business stakeholders.

• User empathy and commercial judgement, with the ability to connect platform investment to practitioner productivity and business outcomes.  

• Ability to balance speed, innovation, explainability, safety, privacy, security and regulatory expectations, as well as experience in building a strong engineering culture focused on reliability, quality, operational ownership and continuous improvement.

Pre-Employment Screening

If your application is successful, your personal data may be used for a pre-employment screening check by a third party as permitted by applicable law. Depending on the vacancy and applicable law, a pre-employment screening may include employment history, education and other information (such as media information) that may be necessary for determining your qualifications and suitability for the position.