Data Scientist / ML Engineer (Python)

Mayflower is a technology company building highload products used by millions of people worldwide. Operating at the scale of one of the world's top-50 websites, we solve complex engineering challenges and create solutions that power real-time entertainment for a global audience.

Now we look for a Data Scientist to join our ML team

Job Responsibilities

• Search & Retrieval

  • Develop and improve retrieval pipelines for large-scale production search systems.

  • Work on candidate generation, query processing, matching, filtering, and retrieval strategies.

  • Improve search relevance, result coverage, and overall SERP quality.

  • Analyse failed searches, irrelevant results, zero-result queries, and other search-quality issues.

  • Explore lexical, semantic, behavioural, hybrid, and vector search approaches.

• Ranking & Relevance

  • Build, train, and optimise ranking models for search and recommendation systems.

  • Develop learning-to-rank solutions using behavioural, content-based, contextual, and real-time features.

  • Design ranking features based on clicks, conversions, popularity, freshness, availability, and user behaviour.

  • Evaluate ranking quality using Precision, Recall, NDCG, MAP, MRR, and related relevance metrics.

  • Optimise models for low-latency inference and investigate relevance degradation, bias, and feedback loops.

• Recommendation Systems

  • Develop recommendation models and candidate-generation strategies for personalised and non-personalised scenarios.

  • Build recall and ranking stages for multi-stage recommendation pipelines.

  • Work on related-item, complementary-item, next-action, and behavioural recommendation use cases.

  • Develop user, item, session, and contextual representations.

  • Balance relevance, diversity, novelty, coverage, and business constraints.

• Experimentation & Evaluation

  • Design and run offline and online experiments for search, ranking, and recommendation improvements.

  • Build evaluation frameworks that connect model quality with product and business outcomes.

  • Design and analyse A/B tests using CTR, conversion, engagement, retention, and revenue-related metrics.

  • Create reproducible pipelines for data preparation, model training, evaluation, and comparison.

  • Evaluate model robustness across traffic segments, query groups, user cohorts, and edge cases.

• ML Pipelines & Collaboration

  • Build end-to-end ML pipelines for feature generation, training, validation, deployment, and monitoring.

  • Work with high-load, real-time, and low-latency production systems.

  • Process large datasets using Python, SQL, batch pipelines, streaming systems, and Kafka.

  • Collaborate with product, backend, data engineering, and MLOps teams to productionise ML solutions.

  • Communicate technical decisions, experiment results, and trade-offs while contributing to ML best practices.

You’ll thrive here if you have

• Strong hands-on experience building production search, ranking, or recommendation systems.

• Strong Python and SQL skills for machine learning, data processing, and analytical queries.

• Practical experience with learning-to-rank, candidate retrieval, search relevance, or recommender-system modelling.

• Experience building and evaluating multi-stage retrieval and ranking pipelines.

• Strong understanding of search and recommendation metrics, including Precision, Recall, NDCG, MAP, MRR, CTR, and conversion.

• Experience with feature engineering and behavioural data such as impressions, clicks, sessions, and conversions.

• Experience with ML libraries such as scikit-learn, XGBoost, LightGBM, CatBoost, PyTorch, or TensorFlow.

• Experience working with large-scale production systems, distributed data processing, analytical databases, and streaming platforms.

• Strong understanding of experimentation and A/B testing, with the ability to independently build, and validate ML solutions.

That can be a plus:

• Experience with Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, Solr, Lucene, or another search-engine stack.

• Experience with vector databases, approximate nearest neighbour search, and hybrid lexical-semantic retrieval.

• Experience with query understanding, classification, spell correction, synonyms, or query expansion.

• Experience with DSSM, two-tower models, BERT-based ranking, cross-encoders, or similar neural architectures.

• Experience with large-scale data and ML platforms such as Airflow, MLflow

Conditions

We know that great talent deserves great conditions, so here's what you can expect when joining us:

• EU-based employment contract and a 3-year Cyprus work visa with full support for your relocation and visa processes, including assistance for your family.

• Full relocation package: flights to Limassol for you and your family, a company-covered apartment for the first month, and full relocation support to make your move smooth and hassle-free.

• Transparent performance reviews twice a year, with bonus opportunities and salary adjustments.

• Private medical insurance for you and your family, a corporate mobile plan (unlimited in Cyprus with roaming included), and interest-free support for car purchases.

• Provident fund (Cypus): a long-term savings plan co-funded by you and the Company together (available after probation) that grows throughout your time with us in Cyprus.

• Mindfulness & well-being support, including psychological assistance with 50% coverage.

• 50% coverage of school and kindergarten fees for your children.

• Fully covered sports benefits, and also access to in-house electric scooters and bike rentals, and cycling purchase compensation.

• Investment in your growth: paid language courses and access to suited-for-you development programs, including conferences, training programs, and coaching to support your professional journey.

• A culture of recognition: a peer reward program to celebrate your contributions.

• A fully equipped office in Limassol’s city center, with everything you need for deep work and collaboration.

• Free catering in the office and an in-house coffee bar with high-quality drinks and a health bar stocked with nutritious snacks.

• A strong engineering culture: international teams, corporate events, team buildings, and hackathons—because great work happens in great communities.

Recruitment process

• HR interview (40 min);

• Technical interview (1.5 hour);

• Final interview (45 min).

Mayflower is a technology company building highload products used by millions of people worldwide. Operating at the scale of one of the world's top-50 websites, we solve complex engineering challenges and create solutions that power real-time entertainment for a global audience.

Now we look for a Data Scientist to join our ML team

Job Responsibilities

• Machine Learning & Modeling

  • Develop and train machine learning models for prediction, classification.

  • Build and evaluate regression, classification, clustering, and time-series models.

  • Design feature engineering pipelines and data preprocessing workflows.

  • Evaluate model performance, robustness, and production readiness.

  • Deploy and maintain ML models in collaboration with ml-ops teams.

• Data Analysis & Exploration

  • Explore large datasets to identify patterns, trends, and hidden relationships.

  • Perform statistical analysis and hypothesis testing.

  • Distillate open-source datasets by proprietary data via LLM agents

  • Detect anomalies, outliers, and unexpected metric movements.

  • Translate business or product questions into analytical tasks.

• Data Pipelines & Infrastructure

  • Work with data pipelines and streaming data systems.

  • Process and transform large datasets using Python and SQL.

  • Work with event streams and messaging systems (Kafka).

  • Contribute to data quality monitoring and dataset validation.

  • Work with analytical databases and data warehouses.

• Model Monitoring & Experimentation

  • Design experiments and evaluate model performance in real environments.

  • Implement monitoring for model performance and data drift.

  • Support A/B testing and experimentation frameworks.

  • Improve models based on production feedback and metrics.

• Cross‑Functional Collaboration

  • Work closely with ML engineers, data engineers, and product teams.

  • Communicate model results and analytical insights clearly.

  • Contribute to the development of ML best practices within the team.

You’ll thrive here if you have

• Strong Python programming skills for data science and machine learning.
• Experience working in Jupyter / Python notebooks for experimentation and analysis.
• Strong experience with pandas and numerical data processing.
• Experience with SQL databases and complex analytical queries.
• Experience working with ClickHouse or other analytical columnar databases.
• Experience working with Kafka or other streaming data platforms.
• Experience building and evaluating machine learning models using libraries such as scikit‑learn, XGBoost, LightGBM, or similar.
• Understanding of statistics, probability, and experimental design.
• Experience working with large datasets and data preprocessing pipelines.

Nice to Have

• Experience with deep learning frameworks (PyTorch or TensorFlow).
• Experience deploying ML models to production environments.
• Experience working with Computer Vision models (OpenCV, CNNs, object detection frameworks).
• Experience with distributed data processing or large-scale ML systems.
• Familiarity with ML monitoring, experiment tracking, and model versioning tools.

Conditions

We know that great talent deserves great conditions, so here's what you can expect when joining us:

• EU-based employment contract and a 3-year Cyprus work visa with full support for your relocation and visa processes, including assistance for your family.

• Full relocation package: flights to Limassol for you and your family, a company-covered apartment for the first month, and full relocation support to make your move smooth and hassle-free.

• Transparent performance reviews twice a year, with bonus opportunities and salary adjustments.

• Private medical insurance for you and your family, a corporate mobile plan (unlimited in Cyprus with roaming included), and interest-free support for car purchases.

• Provident fund (Cypus): a long-term savings plan co-funded by you and the Company together (available after probation) that grows throughout your time with us in Cyprus.

• Mindfulness & well-being support, including psychological assistance with 50% coverage.

• 50% coverage of school and kindergarten fees for your children.

• Fully covered sports benefits, and also access to in-house electric scooters and bike rentals, and cycling purchase compensation.

• Investment in your growth: paid language courses and access to suited-for-you development programs, including conferences, training programs, and coaching to support your professional journey.

• A culture of recognition: a peer reward program to celebrate your contributions.

• A fully equipped office in Limassol’s city center, with everything you need for deep work and collaboration.

• Free catering in the office and an in-house coffee bar with high-quality drinks and a health bar stocked with nutritious snacks.

• A strong engineering culture: international teams, corporate events, team buildings, and hackathons—because great work happens in great communities.

Recruitment process

• HR interview (40 min);

• Technical interview (1.5 hour);

• Final interview (60 min).

About the role

Responsibilities

• Own ranking, relevance and recommendation for geo search end to end, from training data through to models serving in production
• Build the label pipeline that turns search sessions and completed rides into trustworthy training data, including correction for position bias and other presentation effects
• Train and own the models that order results, and the confidence model that decides per query whether we serve our own answer or fall back to an external provider
• Build query understanding for our markets, including cross-script matching, using large language models to label offline and distilling into models fast enough for the keystroke path
• Own evaluation end to end: the offline replay harness that scores recorded sessions against real rides, the error analysis that turns failures into work for the right team, and the online experiments that prove impact
• Keep models healthy after launch as data and cities shift
  
  

Qualifications

• 5 or more years building models that shipped and improved a production metric
• Direct experience with ranking, search relevance, or recommendation systems, including how they are evaluated
• Expert Python and SQL, fluency with gradient boosting, and working knowledge of transformers
• Experience taking a model to production and owning it afterwards
• The ability to work across teams, since search quality work generates data and engineering tasks that others own
  
  Preferred qualifications
  
  
• Depth in geocoding, autocomplete, or place search
• Learning to rank in practice: pairwise and listwise objectives, MRR, NDCG, Hit@k, and their failure modes
• Relevance tuning on OpenSearch or Elasticsearch, including analyzers
• Multilingual or cross-script search, for example Arabic and Arabizi or Urdu and Roman Urdu
• Distilling language models under a latency budget, and experience in mapping or geospatial products in developing markets

Benefits

• Help us challenge injustice by creating fair choices for millions of people across 47 countries.
• Develop your professional skills with access to mentoring, career consulting, and learning programs.
• Collaborate with teams around the world and gain international experience through our Global Talent Exchange Program.
• Engage in company-wide challenges, awards, sports activities, employee-led social impact and volunteering projects.
• Work alongside people who take initiative, speak openly, and challenge themselves to grow.
• Improve your language skills through co-financed courses and internal speaking clubs.