Machine Learning Engineering Manager, Airbnb
Relevance and Personalization
$212-265k
Community marketplace for holiday accomodation
Be an early applicant
Community marketplace for holiday accomodation
1001+ employees
Be an early applicant
$212-265k
1001+ employees
Company mission
To create a world where anyone can belong anywhere.
Role
Who you are
- 10+ years of industry experience in applied ML/AI, inclusive MS or PhD in relevant fields
- 3+ years of engineering management experience, with 8+ years of relevant software development industry experience in a fast paced tech environment
- Strong programming (Scala / Python / Java / C++ or equivalent) and data engineering skills, with demonstrated ability to guide design reviews and architecture decisions for ML systems
- Deep understanding of ML/AI best practices (e.g. training/serving skew minimization, A/B test, feature engineering, feature/model selection), algorithms (e.g. neural networks/deep learning, optimization) and domains (e.g. natural language processing, computer vision, personalization, search and recommendation, marketplace optimization, anomaly detection) with the ability to translate technical tradeoffs into product and business outcomes
- Experience with 3 or more of these technologies: Tensorflow, PyTorch, Kubernetes, Spark, Airflow (or equivalent), Kafka (or equivalent), data warehouse (e.g. Hive)
- Industry experience building end-to-end ML/AI infrastructure and/or building and productionizing ML models, including leading multi-quarter initiatives and coordinating delivery across teams
- Exposure to architectural patterns of large, high-scale software applications (e.g., well-designed APIs, high volume data pipelines, efficient algorithms, models) and experience establishing engineering standards (reviews, testing, observability, incident response)
- Experience with test driven development, familiar with A/B testing, incremental delivery and deployment, and ability to create team processes that improve execution predictability and quality
What the job involves
- Our team pushes the boundaries of AI and machine learning throughout the search ranking stack, from data pipelines to feature engineering, model innovation, real-time serving, and large-scale experimentation
- In this role, you’ll amplify impact through technical leadership—setting strategy, raising engineering quality, and ensuring the team delivers reliable results at scale
- You’ll still stay close to the work—guiding architecture and critical technical decisions—while enabling engineers to do their best work
- Collaboration lies at the heart of our culture
- You’ll partner with talented engineers, data scientists, product managers, and designers from across Airbnb to develop holistic solutions that ensure a vibrant and equitable marketplace
- You’ll also be accountable for team health: hiring, coaching, performance management, and building an inclusive culture
- Together, we’re dedicated to advancing Airbnb’s mission to create a world where anyone can belong anywhere
- Work with large scale structured and unstructured data, provide technical leadership to build and continuously improve cutting edge Machine Learning (ML) models for Airbnb product, business and operational use cases
- Work collaboratively with cross-functional partners including software engineers, product managers, operations and data scientists, set team priorities and roadmap, identify opportunities for business impact, understand, refine, and prioritize requirements for machine learning models, drive engineering decisions, and quantify impact
- Lead the delivery of ML/AI models and pipelines at scale, including both batch and real-time use cases, ensuring operational excellence (on-call health, reliability, cost, latency, and model quality)
- Leverage third-party and in-house ML/AI 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, and drive adoption of best practices across the team
- Example projects include: feature platform, model interpretability, hyperparameter optimization, concept drift detection
- Hire, coach, and develop engineers; set clear expectations; conduct performance management; and build a strong, inclusive team culture
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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