Lead/Principal Data Scientist

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!