Senior Lead, Data Science & Machine Learning

About Traveloka

Traveloka stands as Southeast Asia's premier travel and lifestyle super-app, linking millions of travelers with flights, accommodations, experiences, financial products, and more through a single platform. Established in 2012, the company has successfully expanded into eleven markets, processing billions in transactions and earning a strong consumer brand reputation throughout the region.

Team Overview

The Discovery team plays a critical role in helping millions across Southeast Asia find and book travel by powering search, ranking, and recommendations. The data science function supports this by developing the predictive models and foundational datasets that enhance every release, ensuring relevant and personalized user experiences at scale across diverse languages and travel habits unique to the region.

Role Summary

As the Senior Lead Data Scientist, you will serve as the primary individual contributor responsible for shaping and executing solutions across the user journey—from discovery and ranking to pricing. You will set the technical course for the most complex challenges, making pivotal decisions without managing a team directly.

Key Responsibilities

• Define the modeling strategies and experimentation plans covering the product funnel, personally addressing the most critical challenges.
• Design scalable systems capable of handling millions of bookings and global users, managing essential trade-offs.
• Decide on challenging technical questions related to metrics, model architectures, and domain-wide issues.
• Address measurement and modeling obstacles hindering team progress, establishing reusable best practices.
• Advise product and business leaders with trusted data science insights to influence strategy.
• Identify inefficiencies in current models, pipelines, or metrics that incur substantial business costs and drive corrective actions.
• Mentor senior scientists and elevate technical standards through thorough reviews and exemplary practices.

Qualifications and Requirements

• Minimum of 10 years of pertinent professional experience.
• Expert proficiency in Python programming alongside mastery of ML and statistical tools such as scikit-learn, LightGBM, XGBoost, deep learning, and optimization techniques.
• Proficient in advanced SQL and capable of architecting large-scale data and feature infrastructures relied upon by multiple teams.
• Skilled at breaking down complex, cross-domain problems into strategic initiatives that drive funnel performance.
• Deep understanding and authoritative knowledge of search, recommendation, ranking, and pricing mechanisms at marketplace scale.
• Strong grasp of marketplace economics, including anticipating indirect impacts stemming from model changes.
• Expertise in designing and evaluating sophisticated experiments with ownership of widely accepted measurement standards.
• Demonstrated capability to lead technical direction across teams with sound judgment and decision-making authority.
• Educational background in quantitative disciplines; a Master's degree or higher is preferred.
• Experience with cloud technologies, preferably Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and implementing production-level machine learning pipelines.
• Proven history of deploying models that have generated significant, measurable business outcomes in marketplace environments.
• Experience building internal ML platforms, feature stores, or experimentation frameworks that revolutionize team workflows.
• Involvement with marketing and commercial measurement methods such as MMM (Marketing Mix Modeling), MTA (Multi-Touch Attribution), propensity modeling, and Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) that influenced spending and pricing decisions.

Additional Information

If you resonate with the challenge, scale, and timing of this opportunity, we welcome you to apply. Each application will be reviewed thoughtfully, and candidates with closely matching profiles can expect feedback within 5 business days. Traveloka fosters an environment where talented professionals remain engaged by continuously tackling larger and more impactful problems.