Senior Economist

Senior Economist 

Expedia Group's Economics and Experimentation Science team is looking for a Senior Economist to drive causal inference and marketplace optimization at scale—impacting billions of dollars in transaction value across one of the world's largest travel platforms.  

You'll tackle high-stakes problems, including measuring incrementality in two-sided marketplaces, quantifying long-term value of customer behavior signals, and designing quasi-experimental methods to evaluate product changes that can't be measured using A/B testing techniques. Your work will directly shape how Expedia Group balances traveler experience, partner economics, and platform health.  

This is a senior individual contributor role with high autonomy. You'll own end-to-end method development initiatives, influence product strategy at the executive level, and set technical standards for causal inference across the organization. You'll collaborate closely with ML engineers, data scientists, analysts, and product leaders who value rigorous econometric thinking.

In this role, you will:  

• Build scalable econometric models (panel data methods, DiD, RDD, IV) to measure elasticity, changes in supplier behavior, and customer lifetime value in the presence of endogeneity, simultaneity, and platform dynamics  

• Establish the technical roadmap for long-term impact measurement, moving beyond short-term experiment metrics to quantify sustained effects on customer retention, partner engagement, and marketplace equilibrium  

• Design and execute causal measurement frameworks for marketplace interventions, including geo experiments, difference-in-differences, synthetic controls, and instrumental variable approaches, to isolate the true causal effect of product changes  

• Partner with ML teams to integrate causal inference into production systems, informing ranking algorithms, pricing optimization, and recommendation engines with econometrically validated insights  

• Translate complex econometric findings into clear executive narratives that drive multi-million-dollar product decisions, presenting to executive stakeholders with clarity and conviction  

• Mentor data scientists and economists across the organization, elevating the rigor of causal reasoning and experimental design  

Experience and Qualifications:  

• PhD in Economics, Applied Economics, Econometrics, Statistics, or a related quantitative field  

• 8+ years of relevant professional experience  

• Solid foundation in microeconomic theory and applied econometrics, with the ability to apply appropriate causal inference techniques  

• Demonstrated experience applying econometric methods to real-world business problems in tech, e-commerce, or marketplace environments  

• Deep expertise in the causal inference toolkit: IV, DiD, RDD, synthetic controls, panel data methods, experimental design, metalearners, doubleML, causal forests 

• Proficiency in Python or R with strong SQL skills to work with large-scale, noisy, real-world data, including the ability to query and process data 

• Track record of influencing product strategy or business decisions through rigorous quantitative analysis—ideally with examples of work that shipped to production  

• Exceptional communication skills: ability to explain econometric methodology, identifying assumptions, and business implications to non-technical executives  

• Ability to work in a fast-paced business environment 

Preferred Qualifications  

• Publications or working papers in applied economics, econometrics, or quantitative methods (academic or industry venues)  

• Experience with marketplace or platform economics: two-sided markets, network effects, dynamic pricing, or general equilibrium modeling  

• Experience integrating causal models into ML pipelines or production systems  

• Familiarity with modern AI/ML workflows and LLM-assisted analysis tools  

• Background in travel, e-commerce, or large-scale consumer marketplaces