Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Airbnb
Relevance and Personalization (Query Intelligence)
$200-235k
More information about location
Community marketplace for holiday accomodation
Open for applications
Community marketplace for holiday accomodation
1001+ employees
Open for applications
$200-235k
More information about location
1001+ employees
Company mission
To create a world where anyone can belong anywhere.
Role
Who you are
- 5+ years of industry experience in applied Machine Learning, inclusive MS or PhD in relevant fields
- Strong programming (Scala / Python / Java / C++ or equivalent) and data engineering skills
- Deep understanding of Machine Learning best practices (eg. training/serving skew minimization, A/B test, feature engineering, feature/model selection), algorithms (eg. neural networks/deep learning, optimization) and domains (eg. natural language processing, personalization, search and recommendation, marketplace optimization)
- Experience with 3 or more of these technologies: Tensorflow, PyTorch, Kubernetes, Spark, Airflow (or equivalent), Kafka (or equivalent), data warehouse (eg. Hive)
- Industry experience building end-to-end Machine Learning models
- Experience applying large language models and modern NLP — e.g., sequence tagging/NER, text generation, intent classification, or embedding/representation learning
- Familiarity with building natural-language, AI-native and agentic search experiences is a plus
- Exposure to architectural patterns of large, high-scale software applications (e.g., well-designed APIs, high volume data pipelines, efficient algorithms, models)
What the job involves
- The Relevance and Personalization team at Airbnb is responsible for search and recommendation across the entire Airbnb digital platform
- In this role you'll focus on query intelligence, the front door of search working on critical, impactful projects that turn what a guest types, taps, or says into a precise understanding of their intent, spanning autocomplete and smart compose, query tagging, query expansion, and intent modeling across Stays, Experiences, and Services
- Query understanding is where every search begins, and it directly shapes retrieval, ranking, and ultimately the perfect match between guests and hosts
- We build cutting-edge AI technologies across the end-to-end search ranking product stack w.r.t. data pipelines, feature and model innovations, serving and experimentation efficiency, leveraging rich signals from various types of data (structured, sequential, image, text, etc) and increasingly large language models at Airbnb
- You'll build the models that parse free-form and natural-language multimodal queries, extract entities and location context, classify intent, and anticipate what guests want before they finish typing
- We collaborate closely with teams across Airbnb to develop the ranking solutions and support a healthy marketplace for hosts and guests to further Airbnb's mission of creating a world where people can Belong Anywhere
- Work with large scale structured and unstructured data, build and continuously improve cutting edge Machine Learning models for Airbnb product, business and operational use cases, with a focus on query understanding
- Develop query understanding capabilities — autocomplete and smart compose, query tagging (sequence tagging / NER), query expansion, and query/user intent modeling — and natural-language ("search in your own words") search experiences powered by modern NLP and LLMs
- Work collaboratively with cross-functional partners including software engineers, product managers, operations and data scientists, identify opportunities for business impact, understand, refine, and prioritize requirements for machine learning models, drive engineering decisions, and quantify impact
- Hands-on develop, productionize, and operate Machine Learning models and pipelines at scale, including both batch and real-time use cases
- Leverage third-party and in-house Machine Learning tools & infrastructure to develop reusable, highly differentiating and high-performing Machine Learning systems, enable fast model development, low-latency serving and ease of model quality upkeep
- Example projects include: smart compose and language generation for search, LLM-based sequence taggers, LLM-driven query/location expansion, intent classification, and user-intent sequence modeling
Our take
When Airbnb was originally founded, the product helped customers book air mattresses on people's apartment floors. Since then, Airbnb has had over a billion customers hosted through its platform. With more than 4 million registered hosts worldwide, it has grown into a major player in the hospitality sector.
Airbnb has been successful in disrupting the traditional holiday lettings sector. Before it existed accommodation was limited to hotels and bed and breakfasts, but Airbnb has mainstreamed the idea of renting out spare rooms or even entire homes. It has created a new sector of hosts purchasing properties to rent out on the platform and provides a level of flexibility and a range of offerings not previously possible for travelers.
Perhaps a victim of its own success, by 2022 supply of Airbnb-listed properties began to outstrip demand in some markets, as hosts overestimated the appetite for domestic travel. However, the company is still posting strong financials and has unveiled new tools to support its hosts in a tougher rental market. With a healthy bottom line and a huge user base, Airbnb is very likely to overcome the current market turbulence and continue its growth.
Kirsty
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
25% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 10 rounds)
Apr 2020
$500m
GROWTH EQUITY VC
Mar 2017
$447.8m
SERIES F
Total funding: $3.8bn
Company benefits
- Paid volunteer time
- Health food and snacks
- Generous parental and family leave
- Learning and development
- Annual travel and experiences credit
Company HQ
Showplace Square, San Francisco, CA
Leadership
Brian Chesky
(Co-Founder & CEO)Previously an Industrial Designer, studying at Rhode Island School of Design.
Nathan Blecharczyk
(Co-Founder & CSO)Studied Computer Science at Harvard, and had around 4 years of professional Software Engineering experience before founding Airbnb, including interning at Microsoft.
Joe Gebbia
(Co-Founder)Also studied Industrial Design at Rhode Island, and previously founded various design-related startups
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