Staff/Lead LLM Data Scientist

About Agoda

At Agoda, we bridge the world through travel. Our story began in 2005, when two lifelong friends and entrepreneurs, driven by their passion for travel, launched Agoda to make it easier for everyone to explore the world.

Today, we are part of Booking Holdings [NASDAQ: BKNG], with a diverse team of over 7,000 people from 90 countries, working together in offices around the globe. Every day, we connect people to destinations and experiences, with our great deals across our millions of hotels and holiday properties, flights, and experiences worldwide.

No two days are the same at Agoda. Data and technology are at the heart of our culture, fueling our curiosity and innovation. If you're ready to begin your best journey and help build travel for the world, join us.

Get to Know Our Team

Agoda, part of Booking Holdings, we're building a Personal Travel Assistant - an LLM powered product that plans trips end-to-end and enables users to seamlessly book flights, hotels, and activities, all in one experience.

This is a new product built from the ground up, operating directly in real booking flows at Agoda scale. You'll have real ownership over how the system is designed, built, and evolved, with the freedom to make meaningful technical and product decisions from day one.

This role is ideal for senior Data Scientists or ML practitioners who enjoy owning complex systems end-to-end and working at the intersection of ML, product, and engineering.

What You'll Do

• Own end-to-end LLM systems: Design, build, and own LLM-based systems, from understanding user intent to planning multi-step trips and invoking internal systems to search, price, and book.
• Turn ambiguity into production solutions: Translate open-ended product problems into concrete ML and LLM designs, balancing quality, latency, cost, and reliability in a real-world environment.
• Drive cross-functional decisions: Partner closely with product, engineering, and leadership to make informed trade-offs that directly shape the product and user experience.
• Iterate with real-world feedback: Ship quickly, learn from production usage, and continuously improve system behavior at scale.

What We're Looking For

• Technical depth: Strong hands-on Data Science experience, including modeling, feature engineering, statistics, and experimentation.
• LLM systems and evaluation: Experience building and operating production LLM systems (e.g., RAG, tool/agent orchestration, context and memory management), with a strong focus on evaluation, testing, and iteration - or the ability to ramp up quickly in parts of this space.
• Problem-solving mindset: Excellent analytical and problem-solving skills, with comfort operating in open-ended problem spaces where requirements evolve.

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 directly shape a system used in real booking decisions - not demos or prototypes.
• Direct influence: Play a key role in both implementation and product direction.
• Competitive compensation: Flexible leveling with compensation aligned to experience and impact.

If you're excited about building real-world AI products at scale and owning systems that directly impact millions of travelers, we'd love to hear from you