Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Airbnb
Supply & Competitive Intelligence
$196-227k
Community marketplace for holiday accomodation
Posted today
Community marketplace for holiday accomodation
1001+ employees
Posted today
$196-227k
1001+ employees
Company mission
To create a world where anyone can belong anywhere.
Role
Who you are
- 5–10 years of professional experience in applied Machine Learning, with a proven track record of architecting and deploying high-impact models into production at global scale
- Exceptional programming proficiency in Python (required), with additional experience in Scala, Java, or similar languages for building robust backend systems
- Deep mastery of ML fundamentals and best practices—including feature engineering, model selection, A/B testing, and training/serving skew mitigation—alongside advanced algorithms like gradient boosted trees, neural networks, and transformers
- Hands-on expertise with modern ML frameworks and tooling, such as TensorFlow or PyTorch, to drive innovation in model development
- Experience leading data engineering efforts to build end-to-end ML pipelines, encompassing both high-throughput batch processes and low-latency real-time systems
- Strong command of architectural patterns for high-scale software applications, including the design of extensible APIs, efficient algorithms, and resilient data infrastructure
- A disciplined approach to software craft, including test-driven development, incremental delivery, and modern CI/CD deployment practices
- A Bachelor’s, Master’s, or PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or a closely related technical field
What the job involves
- The Community You Will Join:
- Marketplaces Data and AI is a group of passionate machine learning, software, data, and analytics engineers. We are responsible for developing new, cutting-edge AI and data products that leverage Airbnb’s massive datasets across Users, Listings, Pricing, and Supply/Demand. You will be a crucial part of the Guest and Host organization, building the intelligence that powers the web and native apps used by hundreds of millions of guests and hosts globally
- The Difference You Will Make:
- Supply & Competitive Intelligence sits at the intersection of Data/AI and Airbnb's competitive strategy. As the engineer leading crawling infrastructure for the Competitive Intelligence platform, you will build the systems that give Airbnb a real-time, comprehensive view of the global travel market — how competitors price, list, and supply their inventory across every market Airbnb operates in
- Your work will directly shape Airbnb's understanding of its competitive landscape, feeding ML models and data products that inform pricing strategy, supply growth, and product decisions for hundreds of millions of guests and hosts around the world
- A Typical Day:
- Design and deploy ML models that extract and structure competitive intelligence signals — supply availability, pricing patterns, and market saturation — from large-scale crawled datasets across global competitors
- Build and maintain end-to-end ML pipelines spanning feature engineering, offline training, and low-latency online serving, ensuring high data fidelity and resilience to upstream schema drift
- Apply entity resolution and matching techniques to accurately map competitor listings and markets to Airbnb's internal supply taxonomy, using methods such as embedding models, gradient boosted trees, and transformer-based architectures
- Partner with the crawling infrastructure engineer, data engineers, and product teams to translate competitive intelligence needs into well-defined ML problem formulations and measurable success criteria
- Run rigorous offline and online experiments to evaluate model quality, and collaborate with Pricing, Supply Growth, and Strategy stakeholders to turn model outputs into actionable business decisions
- Stay current with the latest advances in ML and AI, identifying opportunities to incorporate new techniques into the competitive intelligence platform
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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