When travelers are searching for a hotel, we want the obvious choice to be trivago! Our leading metasearch engine is super fast and constantly optimized – enabling millions of travelers to compare hotel prices from hundreds of booking sites and find great deals in just a few clicks. We use cutting-edge technology, real-time auction, and machine learning techniques with petabytes of data to create an experience – time and money saved! In the lively city of Düsseldorf, we seize opportunities to learn everyday, innovate, and make an enduring mark on the travel industry. At trivago you will find those who aren’t afraid of change but rather embrace it, turning every challenge into a pathway for growth. Join trivago, work with a great team, and grow with us!

Join us in making a difference

As a Data Scientist in the Auction Team, you will help design and refine trivago’s two-sided marketplace that connects travelers with hotels worldwide. You’ll work at the intersection of market design, causal inference, and machine learning in a cross-functional team of data scientists and software engineers. This role is ideal for someone who thinks like an economist and enjoys turning ideas into working code. Your work will go beyond prediction – you’ll uncover why users and advertisers behave the way they do and translate those insights into real product decisions. Your statistical analysis and modeling will directly shape how we improve our auction mechanism, help advertisers optimize their campaigns, and ensure a fair & competitive marketplace.

Get an inside look at data science at trivago:

How you’ll make an impact:

• Develop, optimize, and put into production algorithms critical for maintaining a fair and healthy marketplace – including models for click-through-rate prediction, advertiser rate accuracy, and reserve price optimization.
• Closely collaborate with the auction backend engineering team to ensure the seamless operation of trivago’s marketplace.
• You’ll also work with stakeholders beyond the auction team – from price backend to frontend – to find and display the best deals for our users.
• Analyze large-scale data to generate hypotheses about new product features and uncover long-term trends in marketplace behavior.
• Create statistical models to establish causal relationships between marketplace components.
• Design experiments, and conduct and analyze A/B tests.
• Develop metrics that measure the accuracy and fairness of our ML models, balancing a great hotel search experience for users with a healthy, competitive marketplace.

Here are some topics you’ll be working on:
– How can we improve ML algorithms that leverage trivago’s rich data on hotel prices and deploy low-latency models to find the best deals for our users?
– What is the causal impact of our algorithmic changes on trivago’s users and marketplace dynamics?
– What are the advantages and disadvantages of different auction-based allocation and payment mechanisms?
– Can we improve the statistical tools and methods we use to test novel product features?
– How can we reduce experiment runtime without sacrificing statistical power?
– How can we best measure long-term impacts of product features?

What you’ll need to thrive:

• At least 2 years of hands-on experience in an analytics-related field.
• A strong foundation in statistics and data analysis, with experience applying it in an academic or professional context.
• An appreciation for economic reasoning, with a basic understanding of auction theory
• Proficiency in at least one statistical programming language: we write production code in Python, and team members also use R for analysis tasks.
• Experience working with SQL. A strong belief that high-quality data science requires understanding the fundamentals, being meticulous, and paying attention to detail.
• Entrepreneurial passion and ambition to drive progress and innovate.
• Motivation to continuously learn – whether in data science, mathematics, software development, or business – and to share insights with a team of equally motivated colleagues.
• Excellent communication skills (verbal and written), confidence presenting ideas and findings to stakeholders at the right level of detail.
• Fluency in English (our company language).

Stand out with:

• A PhD in a quantitative field (statistics/ML, economics, quantitative social science).
• A background in machine learning, econometrics, or causal inference.
• Experience with Bayesian statistics and probabilistic programming (Stan, PyMC or NumPyro).

Worried about missing a few requirements? Still apply, and express your motivation as you may just be the right candidate for this or other roles!

Recruiting process for this role:

• Video introduction
• Introduction call
• Technical Interview
• Interview with Stakeholders and Lead

What you can look forward to:

As you grow, so do we. This is why at trivago, we prioritize your development, offer personalized coaching through Nilo, and provide workshops, educational meetups, conferences, free online learning courses, and access to a fully-equipped campus library.

Moving to join us? No problem. You can count on the visa support from our talent support team, a relocation package, interest-free newcomer loan, free language classes, regular team and many company-wide events to build experiences together.

Life happens. We offer self-determined vacation (with a minimum of 25 vacation days), flexible working hours, up to 2 work from home days weekly. Additionally you can work remotely from a different location, within Germany or selected countries abroad for up to 20 days per year. You also get free access to the Heycare platform for personalized nanny assistance, and an on-campus kids room.

Enjoy your office days. Use your daily canteen budget to share lunch with colleagues in our canteen, help yourself to complimentary snacks and drinks in our kitchens, choose from a variety of fitness options with our on-site gym, sports classes, and Urban Sports Club membership, and enjoy the comfort of ergonomic desks and focused work areas.