Hostelworld Group
Online Travel Agencies (OTAs)
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Hostelworld is the world's leading Social Travel platform - a social network-powered OTA on a mission to help travellers find their people and create unforgettable moments together. Founded in 1999 and headquartered in Ireland, we're a team of around 270 people serving hostel partners across more than 180 countries.
Since launching our social network in 2022, we've welcomed over 3.4 million social members who aren't just booking trips, they're messaging, finding events, meeting up and becoming powerful brand advocates. This community generates a rich proprietary dataset of 16 million+ chat messages and 17 million bookings, powering AI-driven personalisation and network effects that no generalist OTA can replicate.
We are not just another OTA - we created an entirely new category – Social Travel. If you want to shape the future of travel by putting people and shared experiences at the heart of it, you'll fit right in here - Learn more about our Team!
At Hostelworld, our culture is a direct reflection of our customers: adventurous, curious, and social. We have a shared love of travel that fuels our work and connects us on a deeper level. It’s a fast-paced environment that blends the agility and "scrappy" resourcefulness of a start-up with the experience and ambition of a global, publicly listed company.
We are a team of pragmatic optimists who are data-obsessed and results-driven. We value a ‘test and learn’ mindset, encouraging experimentation and empowering our teams to take calculated risks. We believe in doing the right thing—for our customers, our partners, and each other. We foster a supportive and collaborative atmosphere where diverse perspectives are celebrated, and where every team member has the opportunity to make a significant impact on our journey. We embrace the journey, not just the destination, and we seek leaders who will thrive in a dynamic environment and inspire their teams to do the same.
This role is based in Portugal. We have an office hub in Porto available for those who prefer a hybrid model where you can spend time with colleagues in-person. You will need to be able to commute to our office hub as required from time to time.
Build production ML and LLM systems that improve Hostelworld discovery, relevance and efficiency. This role focuses on MCP servers, agent-facing tools, LLM applications, model evaluation, and adapting open-source or commercial models to improve accuracy, latency and cost.
Translate traveller, hostel and business problems into ML/LLM solutions across search, ranking, destination discovery, property Q&A, social matching and content understanding.
Design, build and operate MCP servers and agent-facing APIs that expose Hostelworld capabilities safely to LLMs and external agent ecosystems.
Build LLM applications using RAG, embeddings, vector search, tool/function calling, structured outputs, moderation and product logic.
Improve Hostelworld-specific accuracy through benchmarks, error analysis, prompt/version control, fine-tuning, distillation, synthetic data and model selection.
Evaluate and adapt open-source or commercial models where they improve quality, latency, vendor flexibility or inference cost.
Own productionisation end to end: data pipelines, embeddings/features, model serving, APIs, monitoring, alerting, documentation and support.
Work with AI Gateway, data platform and engineering teams on model routing, caching, rate limits, cost observability, guardrails and provider abstraction.
Define hypotheses, run experiments and communicate technical, product and commercial impact to Product, Engineering, Analytics, Marketing and senior stakeholders.
MCP and agent visibility: hostel search, property Q&A, city/social context, deep links and logging to identify blind spots in AI-mediated travel discovery.
Hostelworld-specific LLM quality: evaluation datasets using inventory, reviews, attributes, social signals, booking context and destination data.
Cost and latency optimisation: model routing, caching, smaller models, batching, quantisation, distillation and provider selection.
Reusable infrastructure: evaluation harnesses, deployment patterns, libraries and templates for a small high-expertise ML team.
Strong Python and SQL, with modular design, testing, CI/CD, code review, documentation and operational ownership.
Production ML experience, ideally in search, ranking, recommendations, personalisation, marketplaces, travel, ecommerce or consumer products.
Practical LLM engineering: RAG, embeddings, vector search, tool/function calling, structured outputs, prompt management and monitoring.
Experience building ML/LLM services.
MCP servers, agentic workflows, LangGraph/LangChain/LlamaIndex or equivalent orchestration frameworks.
Strong evaluation mindset: offline benchmarks, relevance evaluation, A/B testing, error analysis, factuality/safety checks, latency and cost measurement.
Ability to reason about model trade-offs: frontier vs small model, fine-tuned vs prompted, traditional ML vs rules, and quality vs latency vs cost.
Working knowledge of cloud/data/ML infrastructure such as GCP, BigQuery, Vertex AI, Kubernetes preferred; Redis, Postgres, MongoDB/vector stores or similar also applicable.
Clear communication with engineers, product managers and senior stakeholders.
Fine-tuning, distillation, quantisation or serving open-source models.
Agentic experience.
Multilingual travel content, review summarisation, moderation, social graphs, recommendation systems or marketplace ranking.
Synthetic data or prompt-set generation for AI visibility, competitor benchmarking or agent-behaviour measurement.
First 90 days: understands Hostelworld ranking, social travel, Q&A, AI Gateway and MCP priorities; ships or materially improves one LLM/MCP component or evaluation framework.
Six months: owns a measurable workstream improving LLM answer quality, agent discoverability, latency or cost with monitoring and product/business impact.
Long term: becomes a go-to technical owner for Hostelworld’s agentic AI and LLM infrastructure.
Competitive salary & benefits
Enhanced annual leave plus 3 Wellbeing Days per year
Paid family leave (maternity, paternity, surrogacy & adoption)
Agile working (plus a Working from Abroad Policy!)
Support for your ongoing growth & development
Inclusive people policies (sickness, menopause, compassionate and fertility leave)
A chance to give back to your local community with 5 paid volunteering days
Grow others - We fundamentally believe that investing in growing others benefits everyone, whether it's helping them develop hard or soft skills. We want learning and growing to be part of our DNA to help makes us a better team, together.
Master it - We are obsessed with our area of expertise and enjoy developing our skills. We rarely take things at face value; we investigate, interrogate, and always look for ‘the why,’ and wherever possible, we use data to find the best solution.
Collaborate - We are in it together, for the tough stuff and the celebrations too. To achieve the best results, we need expertise from all areas of the organisation, and we wholeheartedly welcome diverse thinking.
Adapt - We work fluidly, adapting to new information and the evolving environment while staying committed to our goals. Innovation and experimentation fuel our projects and we’re never afraid to pivot.
Deliver - Our focus is always on the end result; we value outcomes over activity. We collaborate to deliver work at speed without dropping any of our other behaviours.
We believe in talented and diverse teams that reflect the diversity of our customers and the communities in which we operate. Everyone brings different perspectives and experiences. We lay out the above requirements to guide applicants to the experiences that we believe will allow you to be successful in the role. If you don’t meet them all, please consider applying if you think you can still perform the role as described.
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Hostelworld Group
