Senior Data Scientist

Duties and Responsibilities

• Own a major modeling area - forecasting or pricing - and drive multi-quarter initiatives across models, pipelines and people.
• Work across the following areas:
  • Validation standards: set the backtesting, calibration and uncertainty checks others follow, measured in business terms
  • Experimentation: design and debug live experiments - set them up correctly, size them properly, catch broken readouts before they mislead anyone
  • Demand measurement: measure how customer demand responds to business decisions, and evaluate new policies safely before rollout
  • Production ML: design systems so that what was trained is exactly what runs in production
• Mentor junior data scientists through review, pairing and honest feedback.
• Reframe business asks into well-posed analytical problems - and push back on ill-posed ones.
• Communicate results and risks honestly to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Able to work under pressure and change, and balance among speed, reliability, interpretability.

Requirements and Qualifications

• BS/MS/PhD in a Business, IT, Mathematics, Science or Engineering discipline
• 4-8 yrs relevant experience beyond first degree, owning production ML that drove real commercial decisions
• Expert Python and SQL on large time-ordered datasets.
• Deep validation craft: you build evaluation and monitoring infrastructure, not just use it.
• You know when not to add complexity, and can defend simplicity to stakeholders.
• Comfortable communicating results through stakeholder-facing dashboards (Looker Studio or similar) as well as written analysis.
• Good working knowledge of productivity tools such as G Suite, Git, Jira, Confluence.
• Experience from any data-rich industry is welcome — e-commerce, fintech, logistics, telco, ride-hailing or beyond. Airline or pricing background is not required.

Machine Learning

• Solid understanding of machine learning algorithms — XGBoost, LightGBM, neural networks, decision trees — with a clear grasp of why you tuned what you tuned.
• Strong Python and hands-on experience with ML frameworks such as scikit-learn, TensorFlow, or PyTorch.
• Demonstrable understanding of forecasting and regression pitfalls — lag feature leakage, target leakage in cross-validation, high-cardinality categorical handling, and the trade-offs between MAE, MAPE, and RMSE — you catch these unprompted and choose objectives and metrics that match the business decision.
• Ability to interpret models — SHAP, partial dependence, residual diagnostics — and explain results to non-technical stakeholders without dumbing them down.
• Statistical modeling beyond tree ensembles — GLMs (Poisson, Tweedie, logistic), quantile regression, hierarchical / mixed-effects models and state-space time-series models — with judgment on when they beat gradient boosting.
• Hands-on Google Cloud Platform experience, particularly BigQuery (window functions, partitioning, cost-aware SQL) and Vertex AI (training jobs, model registry, endpoints, pipelines).
• Nice-to-have: deep learning for tabular and time-series problems (TFT, N-BEATS, NeuralProphet, TabPFN, Chronos); probabilistic and Bayesian modeling; AutoML tooling such as PyCaret for rapid baselining.

Pricing & Demand Science

• Propensity / take-up modeling with well-calibrated probabilities — you know an uncalibrated probability must never feed a price.
• Price-elasticity and demand-response estimation from experimental and observational data.
• Price optimization under business constraints and guardrails, and offline simulation of a pricing policy before it touches customers.
• Encoding domain structure into models — e.g. monotonic price-demand constraints in gradient boosting.
• Nice-to-have: multi-armed / contextual bandits or reinforcement-learning approaches to pricing; personalization and segmentation.

Forecasting & Optimization

• Forecasting large families of related time series — per-product, per-market — with hierarchical structure, seasonality and event effects, and sensible cold-start handling for new products or markets.
• Probabilistic forecasting: quantile and distributional forecasts, prediction intervals, and evaluating them honestly (coverage, pinball loss) rather than only point accuracy.
• Forecasting demand that accumulates toward a deadline (booking- or order-curve style problems), and handling censored demand — when sell-outs truncate what you can observe.
• Mathematical optimization on top of forecasts — allocating scarce inventory or capacity via linear / integer programming and marginal-value reasoning.
• Turning distributions into decisions: expected marginal value of the next unit of inventory (probability of sell-out × expected revenue), quantile-based allocation of remaining capacity, always with business-rule guardrails on top.
• Nice-to-have: clustering and market-segmentation methods; simulation-based evaluation of decision policies.

Experimentation & Causal Inference

• You have measured real effects with modern causal methods — double ML, uplift modeling, difference-in-differences, synthetic control, instrumental variables — and know their assumptions and failure modes.
• You recognize correlation-vs-causation traps in commercial data unprompted, and propose credible ways to measure the true effect.
• You can design, size, monitor and analyze A/B tests end to end, and detect a broken experiment from its readout.

Algorithm Engineering

• Experience productionizing models end-to-end — from SQL feature pipelines to deployed serving endpoints — on GCP using Vertex AI and BigQuery.
• Orchestrating batch ML on Airflow / Cloud Composer — containerized jobs, sensible schedules and dependencies, alerting that reaches a named owner — and Spark for heavy post-processing when the data demands it.
• Integrating model outputs with third-party vendor and reservation systems, with data-freshness and sanity checks that fail loudly rather than ship stale decisions.
• You have maintained, debugged and retired production pipelines, not just handed models over the wall.
• Monitoring discipline — drift detection, data quality checks, model performance tracking in production.
• Nice-to-have: decision-making under uncertainty (inventory/stocking problems); operations research; LLM-based or agentic tooling (LangGraph, MCP servers, eval harnesses).

Career Growth

Dispatcher to captain, ramp agent to data analyst, brand executive to CEO - these are some Dare To Dream stories of our Allstars.

Based on your performance and contribution in this role, you'll grow into becoming a Lead Data Scientist. In this role, you'll own the team's modeling portfolio, set methodology and standards, and coach a team of data scientists.

Diversity and Equal Opportunity

We are all different - one talent to another - that is how we rely on our differences. At AirAsia, you will be treated fairly and given all chances to be your best. We are committed to creating a diverse work environment and are proud to be an equal opportunity employer.

Note to Search Firms

AirAsia does not accept unsolicited assistance from search firms for employment opportunities. All CVs / resumes submitted by search firms to any employee at our company without a valid written search agreement in place will be deemed the sole property of our company. No fee will be paid in the event a candidate is hired by our company as a result of an agency referral where no pre-existing agreement is in place.