Andrew Mende

Andrew Mende is a Senior Product Manager Machine Learning at Booking.com, where he leads the team responsible the ML model powering the company's hotel search.

Over nearly five years, Andrew’s team consistently delivered data-driven improvements through new features and algorithm enhancements, resulting in substantial increases in customer conversion rates. These gains were validated rigorously via A/B experiments, demonstrating a clear impact on search relevance and user experience.

Andrew played a key role in transitioning Booking.com’s hotel search relevance engine from a heuristic-based algorithm to a machine learning-driven model, a critical deployment within the organization due to its high load and significant business impact.

Under his leadership, the ML-based ranking system notably improved search quality and customer engagement, positioning Booking.com at the forefront of personalized travel experiences.

Innovatively, Andrew introduced an interleaving testing approach that enabled the team to test five times more ML hypotheses in production each year. This methodology accelerated experimentation and optimization, driving continuous enhancements in the search ranking system.