Lead Data Scientist - AI Assistant

About the role

Agoda is hiring a Lead/Principal Data Scientist to own its AI Assistant, which turns a loose travel idea into a personalized trip plan across hotels, flights and activities. The assistant runs on live inventory of 6M+ properties, 130K+ flight routes and 300K+ activities, and the role suits senior data scientists and ML practitioners who want end-to-end responsibility for complex systems where ML, product and engineering meet.

Key responsibilities

• Own the assistant's core intelligence: intent understanding, multi-step trip planning, memory and tool calls into Agoda's search.
• Build the evaluation backbone: offline evaluations, LLM-as-judge models calibrated against human labels, and A/B tests.
• Use data to make trade-offs among quality, latency, cost and reliability, with product, engineering and leadership.
• Ship ideas into production quickly and use usage data to guide the next fixes.
• Set technical direction and data science practices for building and evaluating agents, and mentor other data scientists.

Required profile

• Strong data science fundamentals: modeling, statistics, experimentation and causal inference.
• Hands-on experience building LLM systems with an evaluation-first approach.
• Excellent analytical and problem-solving skills, comfortable in open-ended problem spaces.
• Nice to have: experience in online travel, e-commerce, search, ranking, recommendations, pricing or personalization; experience with production LLM or generative-AI systems; advanced degree in Computer Science, Statistics, Operations Research, Mathematics or a related field.

Required skills

• LLM systems: RAG, tool use, agent orchestration, context and memory
• Offline evaluation and A/B testing
• Causal inference and experimentation