We are looking for two Data Scientists (1 junior and 1 medior level) who will help us solve valuable business challenges for KLM’s Operations department, by developing innovative data science solutions.

You will be working in the Blue AI team alongside other Data Scientists, Machine Learning Engineers and Product Owners of the Operation Decision Support (ODS) department. The core focus of ODS is to optimize processes concerning fleet, crew, ground services and the destination network. Our models aim to answer highly relevant questions such as:

• - How many meals are needed on board?
• - How much ground staff is needed and at what time?
• - How many no-shows can we expect on this flight?
• - How much delay will a flight incur and how can we minimize the impact?

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

Besides contributing to these exciting projects, there are opportunities to:

• - Spend ample time on your learning & development
• - Work on an innovation project in KickstartAI (kickstartai.nl);
• - Present your latest learnings at one of our KLM community events and/or at external conferences.

Do you want to see your model’s predictions in action the next time you take a flight? Then do not hesitate and apply!

As a Data Scientist, you will land in the growing agile Blue AI team. Together with other data scientists, machine learning engineers and product owners, you will tackle challenging Machine Learning projects. The outputs of our models are used by more than 5 departments, influencing the millions of KLM passengers.

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 operations 24/7. These models help your colleagues to supply meals on board, do workforce planning in terminals or determine the amount of water needed on board;
• Meet with stakeholders and subject matter experts to gain a better understanding of the underlying business problem and requirements;
• Perform extensive exploratory data analysis to assess data quality, gain important insights and fully understand the underlying process;
• Research and choose an appropriate set of potential models and loss functions that align with the problem statement 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;
• Design and execute project-agnostic experiments that have the potential to improve the performance across multiple models;
• Help put your model into production by working together with engineers, inside and outside of the team;
• Maintain and/or improve your model through monitoring, re-training, adding new features etc.;
• Share your greatest lessons at one of our 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 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% time must be related to your role, but don’t have to be related to the projects you normally work on.

You will be working in a hybrid way, partially from home and partially from the office (1-2 days) at Schiphol East, where you can watch the airplanes take off and play some foosball while you run your hyperparameter tuning.

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). This department currently comprises about 40 Data Science professionals in product teams across KLM, sharing knowledge, training and (social) events.

This vacancy is specifically for the BlueAI product team that works for KLM Operations and consists of of 5 ML Engineers, 5 Data Scientists and 2 Product Owners with whom you will work on a day-to-day basis.

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.

This position is for both Junior (1-2 years of experience) and Medior level (3+ years of experience).

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 and IT
• Curious, 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
• Ability to contribute to in-depth technical discussions
• Ability to collaborate with both technical and non-technical colleagues, as well as working individually
• Strong problem solving skills with a bias for action

We are looking for Data Scientists with 1-3+ years of experience.

The skills and experience you bring to the team:

• A Master’s degree (or higher) in Computer Science, Data Science, Artificial Intelligence, Econometrics, Mathematics, Statistics or other technical field;
• 1-2 years (junior) or 3+ years (medior) of industry experience developing machine learning models
• Excellent university results, extracurricular activities, internships, personal projects etc. are considered a big plus especially if you lack substantial industry experience
• Extensive experience in Python and ability to write clean, reusable production-level code. If you lack industry experience, willingness to learn how to write production-grade code is required
• Experience working in codebases collaboratively using version control
• Solid theoretical understanding of various supervised machine learning algorithms and loss functions. You can argue why a certain model would be suited for a business problem and understand the implications of the output;
• Experience with gradient boosting models and/or timeseries modeling
• Strong data wrangling, exploration and visualization skills using the python package of your choosing

Nice to haves:

• Experience with Large Language Models (LLMs) and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines
• Experience with Google Cloud or Azure
• Familiarity or experience with REST APIs, Docker, Kubernetes etc.
• Experience with scrum / agile working
• Experience with (Py)Spark

• A gross salary between €4.252,77 and €6.413,63 per month;
• Plenty of scope for personal development and great advancement opportunities;
• An excellent pension scheme and 8% holiday allowance;
• A year-end bonus of 8.33%;
• A profit-sharing scheme, up to 20%;
• 25 leave days and 5 extra days off;
• 7 extra days off if you work irregular shifts;
• Substantial discount on airfare (when you have been employed for at least 6 months);
• A travel expense scheme and free use of the bus network around Schiphol;
• If your job allows it: working from home and up to 8 weeks working from abroad (EU and Caribbean);
• 2% development budget;

Don’t wait any longer and apply for this function before the final boarding call on 10/06/2024! A motivation letter is no longer required; we will simply ask you a couple of questions during your online application. Within two weeks, you will receive a message from us. Your application procedure consists of two interviews and –possibly- an assessment and security research.Did you know that according to research, women are less likely to apply than men when they don't meet all the job requirements? What a shame. Because, in our view, 'the perfect candidate' is a myth. So, if you have the drive to grow in aspects of this role, we look forward to your application.A file check (for ex-KLM-employees) and/or a reference check can be part of the application procedure. By applying for this vacancy you consent to these checks.