Machine Learning Engineer

This will be a remote role to start, with plans to transition to hybrid in-office 2x/week located in downtown Toronto.

With millions of diners, 60,000+ restaurant partners and 25+ years of experience, OpenTable, part of Booking Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ: BKNG), is an industry leader with a passion for helping restaurants thrive. Our world-class technology empowers restaurants to focus on what matters most – their team, their guests, and their bottom line – while enabling diners to discover and book the perfect restaurant for every occasion.

Every employee at OpenTable has a tangible impact on what we do and how we do it. You’ll also be part of a global team and its portfolio of metasearch brands. Hospitality is all about taking care of others, and it defines our culture.

Responsibilities

The Machine Learning team at OpenTable supports a wide range of initiatives targeting diners, restaurants, and internal stakeholders. The team is expanding its capabilities to enable AI Agents to power restaurant search and recommendations.

Initiatives include:

• Generative AI for content summarization and question answering.


• Personalized diner recommendations.


• Embedding powered search and discovery via RAG.


• Building and integrating tools for Discovery Agents via LLM tool calls, MCP, and Agent to Agent protocols


• Multimodal understanding of restaurant content (text, images, location, video)

As a mid-level Machine Learning Engineer, you will partner with Machine Learning Scientists and other engineers to train, evaluate, deploy, and monitor models and the features which support them. The primary requirements are a strong engineering background with the ability to build and maintain services in production, and a willingness to learn and collaborate. Some knowledge of Machine Learning through work, schooling, or self-learning is expected.

Requirements

• Experience building, testing, deploying, monitoring, and maintaining production systems


• Proficient in Python and at least one strongly typed language


• Demonstrated experience in the principles of ML

Strong Preference

• Machine Learning expertise (especially ranking, recommendations, classification, NLP, LLMs, RAG, Agentic development)


• Experience developing ETL jobs (especially Spark) or data warehouse infrastructure


• MLOps Experience


• Java proficiency


• Familiarity with A/B Testing best practices


• Track record of project leadership, cross-team collaboration, and coordination with Product Managers and other stakeholders

Bonus

• Pipelines: Spark, Airflow, EMR, Sagemaker, Snowflake, S3, Delta Lake


• ML: PyTorch, XGBoost / CatBoost, Large Language Models


• Deployment: Docker, Kubernetes, Helm, Prometheus, Graphite/Grafana


• Infrastructure: Kafka, ElasticSearch, Postgres, MongoDB, Redis, Qdrant 


• Build: Spring, Maven, Flask, Gunicorn, Poetry, TeamCity

The ML team at OpenTable has two opposing challenges which manifest themselves as opportunities:

• OpenTable is the world's leading provider of online restaurant reservations, seating more than 25 million diners per month via online bookings across approximately 60,000 restaurants. It has a massive wealth of diner and restaurant data going back over 20 years.


• OpenTable fields a lean team, with just over 1,000 employees globally. The ML team is currently twelve people, but striving to grow.

As a member of the team, you will benefit from these factors because your projects will have sufficient data and usage to be interesting and have a meaningful impact, and you will have the opportunity to work on a variety of interesting projects across the company. However, you will be forced to think critically and ruthlessly prioritize, since the team has finite bandwidth. If these challenges sound interesting, then we look forward to hearing from you!

OpenTable strives to provide a fair, collaborative, and balanced work environment.

Benefits and Perks:

• Generous paid vacation + time off for your birthday


• Work from (almost) anywhere for up to 20 days per year


• Focus on mental health and well-being:
  
  
  
  • Company-paid therapy sessions through SpringHealth
  
  
  • Company-paid subscription to HeadSpace
  
  
  • Company-wide week off a year - the whole team fully recharges (and returns without a pile-up of work!)
  
  


• Paid parental leave


• Paid volunteer time


• Focus on your career growth:
  
  
  
  • Development Dollars
  
  
  • Leadership development
  
  
  • Access to thousands of on-demand e-learnings
  
  


• Travel Discounts


• Employee Resource Groups


• Private health and dental insurance


• Life and Disability insurance

There are a variety of factors that go into determining a salary range, including but not limited to external market benchmark data, geographic location, and years of experience sought/required. The range for this Toronto, Canada based role is $120,000-$160,000 CAD.

We offer a competitive base salary and benefits including: health benefits; flexible spending account; retirement benefits; life insurance; paid time off (including PTO, paid sick leave, medical leave, bereavement leave, floating holidays and paid holidays); and parental leave benefits. This role is eligible to be considered for an annual bonus and equity grant.

Inclusion

We’re committed to creating a workplace where everyone feels they belong and can thrive. We know the best ideas come when we bring different voices to the table, so we're building a team as dynamic as the diners and restaurants we serve—and fostering a culture where everyone feels welcome to be themselves.

If you need accommodations during the application or interview process, or on the job, we’re here to support you. Please reach out to your recruiter to request any accommodations.