Harnham
Contract Data Scientist - Search / Ranking / Recommendation
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Contract Data Scientist - Search Order / Ranking / Recommendation
£480/day | Outside IR35 | 3-4 months | Remote / Hybrid
I'm working with a major consumer travel business looking to bring in a hands-on Data Scientist to support a project focused specifically on search order, ranking and recommendation.
The business manages a large inventory of holiday properties, and the core problem is deciding which properties should appear, in what order, for a given customer search.
This is not a generic Data Science role. Previous experience with search ranking / sort order / recommendation systems is essential.
The role will involve:
- Improving the search order / ranking logic used to surface properties to customers
- Building and refining recommendation and ranking models
- Working across ranking by destination, country, brand, park and individual property / unit level
- Running A/B tests and experiments to measure the impact of ranking changes
- Measuring performance against customer and commercial KPIs
- Analysing how factors such as price, brand, region and country affect sort order performance
- Building out a broader dashboard / KPI framework
- Working with behavioural and transactional data
- Feeding findings and recommendations back to product and business stakeholders
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Essential experience:
- Hands-on experience with search ranking / search order / sort order
- Hands-on experience with recommendation / recommender systems
- Strong Python and SQL
- Snowflake
- AWS
- Strong A/B testing / experimentation
- Experience measuring ranking or recommendation changes against commercial KPIs
- Strong hands-on Data Science background
Nice to have:
- Learning-to-rank / re-ranking
- Metaflow
- XGBoost / LightGBM
- Propensity modelling
- Optimisation
- PyMC
- Streamlit
- Cold-start recommendation
- Travel, ecommerce, marketplace or booking-platform experience
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Contract: 3-4 months
Rate: £480/day
IR35: Outside IR35
Location: Remote / Hybrid
Desired Skills and Experience
- Strong hands-on Python and SQL
- Experience building search ranking, sort-order or recommendation systems
- Experience with learning-to-rank, re-ranking or personalisation
- Strong Snowflake and AWS experience
- Experience working with large-scale behavioural and transactional data
- Strong A/B testing and experimentation background
- Able to measure model changes against commercial KPIs
- Experience building dashboards / KPI frameworks and feeding findings back to stakeholders
- Comfortable working as a hands-on individual contributor across the full Data Science lifecycle
- Ideally experience within travel, ecommerce, marketplaces, booking platforms or other consumer businesses
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