KAYAK, part of Booking Holdings and the world’s leading travel search engine, is hiring a mid-level Data Scientist in Berlin to build recommendation systems that help travellers find and choose flights, stays and more. You will turn business questions into models, run experiments, and ship machine learning solutions with other data scientists, engineers and product teams.
 About KAYAK
Business: Travel search across flights, hotels, rental cars and packages
Brands: Includes momondo, Cheapflights and HotelsCombined
Parent: Booking Holdings (NASDAQ: BKNG)
Scale: Billions of queries across platforms
Office: Friedrichshain, Berlin, 3 days per week on site
Perks & Career Growth
Time Off: 6 weeks paid vacation plus a birthday off and a company-wide week off
Wellbeing: Paid therapy sessions, Headspace and no-meeting Fridays
Growth: Development dollars, leadership development and on-demand e-learning
Extras: Pension contributions, transport subsidy, bike leasing, free lunch twice a week
Position Overview
This Data Scientist position focuses on recommendations that make travel search better. You will define modelling problems and hypotheses, design and evaluate experiments, build quick prototypes, and release scalable ML solutions that improve user experience and key business metrics, while explaining results clearly to technical and non-technical colleagues.
Why This Role Matters: Small ranking and recommendation changes can affect millions of travellers. In this role your models go into production, you work with strong colleagues in a flexible, well-supported workplace, and your impact is measured in real results.
Key Responsibilities
Modelling & Experimentation
- Translate product and business challenges into clear modelling problems, hypotheses and goals
- Design and evaluate experiments and build rapid prototypes
- Review results carefully and iterate on promising ideas
Production & Collaboration
- Ship production-ready, scalable machine learning solutions
- Work with Data Science, Product and Engineering teams
- Explain findings, recommendations and trade-offs clearly
Qualifications & Requirements
Technical Foundation
- Strong skills in statistics, machine learning and programming with real-world problem solving
- Hands-on experience building ML models in business or production settings
- Demonstrated capability matters more than academic credentials
Working Style
- Ownership, sound judgment and analytical thinking
- Fluent use of AI-assisted workflows with critical review of outputs
- Curiosity, humility and a collaborative mindset
Bonus
- PyTorch, Polars, CometML, Arize, Docker, Airflow, Trino and Git/GitHub
- Agile ways of working such as sprint planning
About KAYAK & Data Science Careers in Berlin
KAYAK is a global travel metasearch company that started small and grew into an industry leader. Berlin is one of Europe’s strongest tech hubs, with many data and ML roles in product-led companies.
Career Excellence: Build recommendation models that improve how millions of people plan their trips.
Who Should Apply?
- Mid-Level Data Scientists: With production ML experience
- ML Engineers: Interested in recommendation systems
- Applied Scientists: Who like experiments and A/B testing
- Python and PyTorch Developers: Ready to work on consumer products
- Travel and E-commerce Analysts: Moving into modelling roles
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