Senior Machine Learning Engineer

Introduction

Are you passionate about leveraging data to drive impactful business decisions? Do you thrive in a dynamic and collaborative environment where your analytical and technical skills can shine? At KLM, we're on a mission to elevate our data-driven decision-making to new heights, and we’re looking for enthusiastic, proactive, and skilled Data Scientists  to join our innovative team. As a part of our Data, OR & AI department, you'll work on cutting-edge projects that directly influence our operations, enhance customer satisfaction, and drive significant business value. If you're ready to take on real-world challenges and be a part of a forward-thinking organization, we want to hear from you! Join us in shaping the future of aviation with data.

What are you going to do?

Before diving into your IDE or notebook to start hacking, you will fully immerse yourself in the context of the business in order to come up with the best solution to the challenge. Important aspects of your job on a day-to-day basis will be to:  

• Work on prediction models, which are used in KLM live customer interactions 24/7. These models help our customers getting the right product and service for them.  
• Meet with stakeholders and subject matter experts to gain a better understanding of the underlying business problem and the requirements;   
• Perform exploratory data analysis to assess data quality and gain important insights;  
• Research and choose an appropriate set of potential models and loss functions that align with the problem and discuss validation strategies with your fellow data scientists;  
• Perform feature engineering, be creative and combine new sources with the traditional data warehouses or our vast data lakes to increase model performance;  
• Execute experiments while logging your model’s metrics, parameters and metadata to a model registry for easy sharing and reproducibility;   
• Put your model into production, and work together with engineers inside and outside of the team to ensure company-wide production standards are met;  
• Maintain and/or improve your model through monitoring, re-training, adding new features etc.;  
• Guide our upcoming transition to the cloud: Identify requirements and improvements, communicate them to relevant parties;  
• Determine how Data Science requirements translate to architectural components and way of working;  
• Share your greatest lessons at one of the community events 
• Have fun and enjoy while you are doing it!  

 
You are also encouraged and expected to spend 15-20% of your time with us learning new things, doing research and developing yourself. You can do this by following courses, reading papers or doing cool hack projects with your colleagues. The projects you do in your 15-20% developing time must be related to your role, but do not have to be related to the projects you normally work on. 
  
Do you have what it takes to take KLM’s data-driven decision-making to a higher level?  
 

Where do you land?

You will be working in a hybrid way, partially from home and partially from the office at the headquarters of KLM in Amstelveen. We have flexible working hours and office days; hence we will find something that suits you. 
  
You will be hired by the Data, OR & AI department, which will place you into one of the Data Science product teams in KLM (i.e. a matrix organization). The OR department currently comprises about 40 Data Science professionals in product teams across KLM, sharing knowledge, training and (social) events. Across all expertise, we are growing and in search of new talent so we can scale the AI capabilities at KLM. 
 
We are looking to fill a Sr. ML Engineer role in the Finance domain.
 
The Finance Data Analytics (FDA) team currently consists of multiple Data Scientists, who work closely with our contacts in the business. The FDA team is part of a larger value chain embedded in their part of the organization, meaning you will also work closely together with other data teams that are specialized in areas like Data Engineering and Data Governance. The core focus of the FDA team is improving decision making in financial processes around KLM. They answer questions like: 
 

• How can we best manage the risk of having cash in foreign currencies? 
• How can we help the contracting team to extract rates from contracts?  
• How can we find invoices with incorrectly registered VAT? 
• Can we use GenAI models to prevent revenue leakage during our invoicing process?

The answers to these questions directly influence the operations of KLM, which means plenty of opportunities to work on projects that truly save costs, increase customer satisfaction and revenue. 
 

Your profile

We are looking for a motivated, enthusiastic and proactive colleague with the necessary skills to solve the real business problems and provide value to KLM.   
  
We have found that people who match the following requirements are the ones who fit us best:  

• Tech savvy with a feeling for logic, mathematics & statistics  
• Entrepreneurial, analytical, creative, and results-oriented  
• Well-versed in explaining technical solutions in layman’s terms  
• Eager to learn and stay up to date on state-of-the-art technologies related to machine learning  

  
The skills and experience you bring to the team:  

• Completed Master’s degree (or higher) in Data Science, Artificial Intelligence, Computer Science, Econometrics or similar;  
• 4+ years of industry experience working in a data science team  
• Familiar with software engineering principles and experience writing production-level Python code;   
• Solid theoretical understanding of various Machine Learning algorithms and hands-on experience applying them to real-world cases. You can explain why a certain model / loss function would fit a business problem and understand the implications of the output; 
• Experience deploying models to production using related tools and concepts like scheduled (re)trainings, monitoring and logging;  Deep understanding of the MLOps process.
• Experience with Big Data related tools;  
• We are currently in the middle of a cloud migration from on-premise systems towards GCP, so experience with Cloud Development in general or GCP specifically is a plus. However, you should also be able to understand our current on-premise Kubernetes deployments.  
• Experience with scrum / agile working is a plus. 
• Experience coaching and mentoring junior & medior data scientists/ML engineers
• Bonus points for experience with GenAI/LLMs 

Also you have: 

• EU residency; KLM does not provide sponsorship for this position. 

  
For the FDA team specifically, it’s critical as a Senior ML Engineer to: 

• Put ML use cases into production, adopting a practical and pragmatic mindset. 
• Be a reliable partner for the business: ensuring robust, tested code, quality control, as well as maintaining existing solutions. 
• Coach junior/medior data scientists & ML Engineers: set the right example and help them grow into the best version of themselves. 
• Provide technical leadership. 
• Facilitate the team in discovering and exploring new topics to enhance their learning and growth. 

Technologies we currently use within the team (great if you already know them, or can pick them up when needed): Python, Docker, Kubernetes, MLFlow, Dagster, Git, SQL, DBT, Grafana, Kibana, Prometheus, Spotfire, PowerBI, Atlassian Suite (Confluence, JIRA), GitHub (Actions), GCP.