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.

Our team is looking for someone passionate about Machine Learning. You will be working within a team of scientists and engineers that leverage ML to improve the quality of OpenTable products.

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

1. 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.

2. OpenTable fields a lean team, with just over 1,000 employees globally. The ML team is currently nine 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!

Unfortunately, we do not provide visa sponsorship.

In this role, you will:

• Research and develop ML models, and collaborate with engineers to productionalize them.

• Engineer new features and implement data pipelines that power ML models.

• Design online experiments and analyze their results.

• Contribute to the internal ML packages, and help the team to build tools for training, evaluating, debugging, and interpreting models.

• Stay current with ML research, know when to apply it to your work, and how to communicate it to your partners.

Please apply if:

• Experience implementing, training, evaluating, and debugging Machine Learning models.

• In-depth understanding of Machine Learning

  • Algorithms (e.g., Deep Learning, NLP, GBDT)

  • Metrics (e.g., precision, recall, AUC)

  • Losses (e.g., Categorical Cross-Entropy, Hinge, Focal)

  • Standard Processes (e.g., how to avoid data leakage, prevent overfitting, encode categorical features for Deep Learning or GBDT models)

• Understanding of data structures, algorithms, and OO design

• Strong knowledge of Python and hands-on experience with ML/scientific computing packages (NumPy, SciPy, Pandas, XGBoost, TensorFlow / PyTorch).

• Passion for continuous learning and self-development

• Strong communication skills and the ability to work with others in a closely collaborative team.

Nice to have:

• Experience with one of the following: learning to rank, recommendations, or NLP.

• Machine Learning project or contribution to an open-source ML package that showcases your ability to research, implement and evaluate academic papers, have relevant publications.

• Machine Learning project or Kaggle competition that demonstrates ability to analyze data, create new features, and effectively train, evaluate, and ensemble ML models to improve significantly over non-trivial baselines.

• Experience with Spark, SQL, and Airflow.

• A graduate degree in ML, Mathematics, Statistics, Physics, Economics, or a related technical field.

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.