Senior Product Manager – Recommendations Applications (RecApp)

About Us: At Booking.com, data drives our decisions. Technology is at our core and innovation is everywhere. But our company is more than datasets, lines of code or A/B tests. We’re the thrill of the first night in a new place. The excitement of the following morning. The friends you make. The journeys you take. The sights you see. And the food you sample. Through our products, partners and people, we can empower everyone to experience the world.

Role Description:

The Recommendations Applications (RecApp) team is responsible for building recommendation products and capabilities that power personalized recommendations across Booking.com products, including Destinations, Accommodations, Flights, Attractions, Rides, and more.

This team sits at the intersection of machine learning, data science, experimentation, and product strategy. Its mission is to make recommendations a core product capability across Booking.com, helping travelers discover the most relevant next option, next action, or next part of their journey across multiple surfaces and verticals.

As a Senior Product Manager in this team, you will define the strategy, long-term vision, and success criteria for recommendation applications across Booking.com. You will work closely with engineers, ML scientists, data scientists, analysts, and product teams across multiple verticals, and partner deeply with Connected Trip mission teams to ensure recommendation experiences are coherent, impactful, and scalable across the end-to-end traveler journey.

Key Job Responsibilities and Duties:

• Own and lead the RecApp team’s vision, mission, roadmap, and end-to-end execution across recommendation products and capabilities used by multiple Booking.com verticals.
• Shape and evolve a multi-year product strategy for recommendation applications, aligned with company priorities, vertical strategies, and Connected Trip mission goals.
• Define and own success metrics for recommendation quality and product impact, such as engagement, conversion, attach, relevance, repeat usage, coverage, latency, and system health.
• Drive large-scale experimentation in partnership with data science and analytics, using robust evidence to improve recommendation logic, models, policies, and surfaces.
• Translate fragmented requirements from multiple stakeholders across Destinations, Accommodations, Flights, Attractions, Rides, and other product areas into a coherent and prioritized roadmap.
• Balance short-term wins with long-term platform and capability investments, managing dependencies across teams, verticals, and mission-led initiatives.
• Collaborate closely on ML product decisions, including problem framing, signal and feature strategy, evaluation methods, rollout guardrails, and optimization loops.
• Ensure the recommendation ecosystem is robust, scalable, and reusable, working with engineering on reliability, observability, maintainability, and technical debt where it matters most.
• Build and maintain strong cross-functional partnerships with vertical product teams, Connected Trip mission teams, Marketplace AI & Data partners, and other stakeholders to drive shared outcomes.
• Communicate clearly and frequently to stakeholders and senior leadership, turning complex recommendation and ML topics into simple narratives, trade-offs, and decisions.
• Bring structure and organization to a complex, cross-company problem space, introducing lightweight but effective processes, documentation, and rituals that keep teams aligned.

Role qualifications and requirements:

• At least 7 years of product management experience, owning products or platforms with significant scale and technical complexity.
• Proven experience working on ML-powered products, ideally in recommendation, ranking, search, ads, personalization, or related problem spaces within e-commerce, marketplaces, or similarly high-traffic environments.
• Strong background in data science, analytics, and experimentation, including defining hypotheses, choosing success metrics, working with large datasets, and interpreting A/B test and offline evaluation results.
• Track record of driving multi-year roadmaps for complex systems while balancing experimentation, delivery, and long-term system health.
• Experience collaborating closely with ML engineers and data scientists, with the ability to hold your own in discussions about models, signals, trade-offs, and evaluation approaches.
• Solid understanding of recommendation system fundamentals, such as objective design, retrieval and ranking trade-offs, online vs. offline evaluation, exploration vs. exploitation, and fairness or constraint handling.
• Strong systems thinking and abstraction skills, able to turn multiple use cases and stakeholder asks into clear, reusable recommendation capabilities and product patterns.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills, including aligning diverse teams, handling conflicting priorities, and building buy-in up to senior leadership level.
• Demonstrated ability to bring structure and organization to ambiguity, managing roadmaps, dependencies, and communication across multiple teams and time zones.
• Able to zoom in and out from strategic direction to detailed execution decisions as needed, and to succeed in a highly collaborative, bottom-up environment.

Benefits & Perks: Global impact, Personal relevance

• Annual paid time off and generous paid leave scheme including: parental (22-weeks paid leave), grandparent, bereavement, and care leave

• Hybrid working including flexible working arrangements, working from home furniture and ergonomic support, and up to 20 days per year working from abroad (home country)

• A beautiful sustainable HQ Campus in Amsterdam, that offers on-site meals, coffee, and snacks, multi-faith and breastfeeding rooms at the office

• Commuting allowance and bike reimbursement scheme

• Discounts & Wallet credits to spend on our products, upgrade to Booking.com Genius Level 3, and friends & family Booking.com discount vouchers

• Free access to online learning platforms, development and mentorship programs

• Global Employee Assistance Program, free Headspace membership

DEI: Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at Booking.com

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) have been a core part of our company culture since day one. This ongoing journey starts with our very own employees, who represent over 140 nationalities and a wide range of ethnic and social backgrounds, genders and sexual orientations. Take it from our Chief People Officer, Paulo Pisano: “At Booking.com, the diversity of our people doesn’t just create a unique workplace, it also creates a better and more inclusive travel experience for everyone.”

We will ensure that individuals with disabilities are provided reasonable adjustments to participate in the interview process. Please contact us to request adjustments.

Career Development Opportunities

• Bi-annual performance conversations, company-wide mentoring program, and internal development opportunities

• Unlimited access to online learning platforms: Udemy, Coursera, LinkedIn learning, O'reilly

Application Process

• The interview process will entail a call with one of our Recruiters and a total of 3 interviews, all conducted via Zoom video conferencing.

• This role does not come with relocation assistance.

Booking.com is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and is an affirmative action employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, disability, age, or veteran status. We strive to move well beyond traditional equal opportunity and work to create an environment that allows everyone to thrive.

Pre-Employment Screening

If your application is successful, your personal data may be used for a pre-employment screening check by a third party as permitted by applicable law. Depending on the vacancy and applicable law, a pre-employment screening may include employment history, education and other information (such as media information) that may be necessary for determining your qualifications and suitability for the position.