Staff Data Scientist, loveholidays
3+ days a week in office
Holiday booking service
Open for applications
Holiday booking service
201-500 employees
Open for applications
3+ days a week in office
201-500 employees
Company mission
Loveholiday's mission is to create the ultimate online travel experience.
Role
Who you are
- We're seeking an exceptional technical leader who can drive innovation while maintaining production excellence. The following qualities are essential:
- Technical Excellence: Deep expertise in machine learning approaches with the ability to assess and implement cutting-edge algorithms
- Strategic Thinking: Ability to break down high-level optimisation goals into lower-level components whilst understanding complex/second-order consequences
- Leadership: Proven ability to mentor others, resolve conflicts, and be a key motivator for team members
- Business Acumen: Strong ability to link technical solutions to business outcomes and prioritise work based on impact
- Communication: Exceptional ability to translate complex technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders and influence decision-making
- Problem-Solving: Track record of resolving complex technical challenges that impact multiple teams
- Collaboration: Demonstrated success working across functions and teams to deliver high-impact projects
- Leading multiple end-to-end projects simultaneously, from inception through to production monitoring and optimisation
- Designing and implementing sophisticated experiments and models that significantly enhance business performance
- Expert-level knowledge of machine learning and statistical methods for predictive modelling and forecasting
- Extensive experience deploying ML models to production at scale with robust monitoring systems
- Advanced knowledge of SQL and data manipulation techniques
- Mastery of software engineering best practices including unit testing, CI/CD, model management and experiment tracking
- Track record of successful technical mentorship and team development
- Demonstrated cross-functional collaboration skills across engineering, product, and business teams
Desirable
- Expertise in Deep Learning, Generative AI and Reinforcement Learning
- Advanced knowledge of Time Series Forecasting and Recommender Systems
- Previous experience working in e-commerce, retail, or the travel industry
- Experience designing and analysing large-scale A/B test experiments
- Mastery of workflow orchestration technologies such as Airflow, Dagster or Prefect
- Expert knowledge of technologies such as:
- Google Cloud Platform, particularly Vertex AI
- Docker and Kubernetes
- Infrastructure as Code
- Experience establishing data science best practices across an organisation
What the job involves
- Reporting to the Head of Data Science, the Staff Data Scientist will be a technical leader who drives strategic initiatives and shapes the technical direction of the Data Science function at loveholidays
- You'll be a catalyst for innovation, a mentor to junior team members, and a trusted advisor to stakeholders across the business, helping to implement our AI strategy and align data science capabilities with business objectives
- Leading strategic initiatives from conception to delivery, including stakeholder management and business value articulation
- Researching and developing cutting-edge models and techniques to tackle complex business challenges
- Establishing and implementing best practices across data science systems and services
- Providing technical leadership and mentorship to junior team members, facilitating their growth and development
- Proactively identifying and implementing improvements to team processes or workflows
- Contributing to architectural decisions for data science infrastructure
- Leading knowledge sharing sessions through technical presentations of projects
- Representing data science in cross-functional initiatives and being a trusted advisor beyond your immediate team
- Participating in project prioritisation and strategic planning for the data science function
- Implementing comprehensive monitoring solutions and designing fault-tolerant systems
Application process
- TA screening with someone from our Talent team - 30 minutes
- 1st stage interview with the Head of Data Science - 45 minutes
- Panel interview with key stakeholders, including a task to present in office - 1.5 hours
- Final stage with Chief Data Officer - 45 minutes
Salary benchmarks
Our take
Travel, both domestic and overseas, has been a huge part of the British economy since the late 20th century. In 2019, UK residents spent £43 billion on foreign holidays - almost double the amount spent a decade before.
Despite travel companies suffering considerable reputation damage back in 2020, as they struggled to refund customers whose booked holidays were suddenly cancelled, the appeal of companies like loveholidays to holidaymakers will undoubtedly endure seeing as they make the process of booking holidays much easier.
In the nearest future, loveholidays will need to focus on maintaining its reputation, especially given the wide array of direct competitors who could steal market share. At present, however, loveholidays is still one of the fastest growing online travel agents. If it can keep up the practices which have brought it success over the past 10 years, loveholidays is still in a good position to keep its growth strong for few years to come.
Kirsty
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
Company
Employee endorsements
Opportunities to learn
"The company has made a deliberate decision to invest in great engineers and give us the autonomy and accountability to pick the best tool for the..."
Funding (2 rounds)
Oct 2016
$4.1m
EARLY VC
May 2011
$2.8m
EARLY VC
Total funding: $6.9m
Company benefits
- Discounted holidays for you, your family and friends
- 25 days of annual leave + bank holidays
- Company pension contributions at 5%
- Individual training budget for courses, seminars and memberships to professional bodies
- High degree of autonomy in a strong collaborative environment
- Cycle to work scheme, season ticket loan and eye care vouchers
- Hybrid working with 3 days working in our office (London) and 2 days WFH per week
- Sustainably sourced fruit baskets in the office kitchen
- Increased annual leave for long service
- Ability to buy and sell annual leave
- Enhanced maternity pay = 6 weeks of full pay and 20 weeks at 50% pay
- Enhanced paternity pay = 4 weeks of full pay
Company values
- We are entrepreneurs - We’re proudly commercial, we do more with less, we own the decisions we make and the actions we take
- Everything is written in pencil - As we grow, we think smaller, act quicker and continuously evolve the way we organise our work
- We organise for speed - A flat structure with small teams, allows us to move quickly
- We believe in Team - We’re all in it together
Company HQ
Hammersmith, London, UK
Articles
Leadership
Jonny Marsh
(Non Executive Director)An engineering graduate from the University of Bath, Jonny is also the founder and ex-CEO of nmqa Ltd and co-founder of travelmatch. He served as Loveholiday's COO until 2019.
Alex Francis
(Non Executive Director)Founded travelmatch in 2007 and then loveholidays in 2012, quickly becoming the fastest growing business in the UK by 2019. Now acting as a non-exec for the business since stepping down as CEO in 2020.
People progressing
Joined as UX/Design Manager in 2011, promoted 3 times in 10 years to current position of Lead User Researcher, having previously worked as Senior Product Designer.
Diversity, Equity & Inclusion at loveholidays
Clodagh Beatty (Head of Talent Management, Learning & DE&I)
- We recently hired a Head of L&D, Diversity, Equity & Inclusion to support us in our ongoing commitments to creating an inclusive environment, as well as providing growth opportunities for all our employees
- We want all applicants to feel they can belong at loveholidays
- We have employees from all walks of life and we are only interested in assessing your skills, attitude and talent!
- We support Employee Resource Groups - recently launched our Women's Network at loveholidays
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