With millions of diners, tens of thousands of restaurants, and 23+ years of experience, OpenTable, part of Booking Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ: BKNG), is an industry leader with a unique insight into the world of hospitality. We champion restaurants, bars, wineries, and other venues around the world, helping them attract guests, manage capacity, improve operations and maximize revenue.

Every employee at OpenTable has a tangible impact on what we do and how we do it. You’ll also be part of a global network that includes OpenTable and KAYAK’s portfolio of travel brands including Swoodoo, checkfelix, momondo, Cheapflights, Mundi and HotelsCombined.

Hospitality is all about taking care of others, and it defines our culture. You’ll work in a welcoming and inclusive environment, and get the benefits, flexibility, and support you need to succeed.

The Machine Learning team at OpenTable supports a wide range of initiatives targeting diners, restaurants, and internal partners. Initiatives include:

• Search retrieval and ranking
• Personalized diner recommendations
• Generative AI for content summarization and question answering
• Embedding powered search and discovery
• Personalized diner newsfeed
• Optimization of restaurant promotional campaigns
• Image classification and aesthetics scoring
• Hospitality improvements via guest insights

As a Senior Machine Learning Engineer you will partner with Machine Learning Scientists and other engineers to train, evaluate, deploy, and monitor models and the features which support them. The primary requirements are a strong engineering background with experience building and maintaining services in production, and a willingness to learn and collaborate. Some knowledge of Machine Learning through work, schooling, or self-learning is expected.

Requirements

• Experience building, testing, deploying, monitoring, and maintaining production systems
• Proficient in Python and at least one strongly typed language
• Demonstrated experience in the principles of ML

Strong Preference

• Machine Learning expertise (especially ranking, recommendations, classification, NLP, LLMs)
• Experience developing ETL jobs (especially Spark) or data warehouse infrastructure
• MLOps Experience
• Java proficiency
• Familiarity with A/B Testing best practices
• Track record of project leadership, cross-team collaboration, and coordination with Product Managers and other stakeholders

Bonus

• Pipelines: Spark, Airflow, EMR, Sagemaker, Snowflake, S3, Delta Lake
• ML: TensorFlow, XGBoost / CatBoost, Large Language Models
• Deployment: Docker, Kubernetes, Helm, Prometheus, Graphite/Grafana
• Infrastructure: Kafka, ElasticSearch, Postgres, MongoDB, Redis
• Build: Spring, Maven, Flask, Gunicorn, Poetry, TeamCity

The ML team at OpenTable has two opposing challenges which manifest themselves as opportunities:

OpenTable is the world’s leading provider of online restaurant reservations, seating more than 25 million diners per month via online bookings across approximately 60,000 restaurants. It has a massive wealth of diner and restaurant data going back over 20 years. OpenTable fields a lean team, with just over 1,000 employees globally. The ML team is currently twelve people, but striving to grow.

As a member of the team, you will benefit from these factors because your projects will have sufficient data and usage to be interesting and have a meaningful impact, and you will have the opportunity to work on a variety of interesting projects across the company. However, you will be forced to think critically and ruthlessly prioritize, since the team has finite bandwidth. If these challenges sound interesting, then we look forward to hearing from you!

Benefits:

• Paid Time Off - 20 days a year
• Birthday/celebration PTO - 1 day
• Annual company weeks off
• Flexible sick time off
• Paid volunteer time
• Parental Leave Benefits
• Dental & Vision Insurance
• Life & Disability Insurance
• Group RRSP and DPSP
• Major Medical Insurance (dependent care options)

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

OpenTable aspires to be a workplace that reflects the diverse communities we serve and a culture that is inclusive and welcoming. Hiring people with different backgrounds, experiences, perspectives, and ideas is critical to innovation and to how we deliver great experiences for our users and our partners. Representation matters.

We ensure that individuals with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodation to participate in the job application or interview process, to perform job responsibilities, and to receive other benefits and privileges of employment. Please contact us to request accommodation.