Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer

The Community You Will Join:

Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence are at the heart of the Airbnb product. From Trust to Payments, and from Customer Service to Marketing we rely on ML to ensure that guests and hosts have the best possible experience with Airbnb. 

The Core ML team is the core team responsible for driving CSxAI (Customer Support x Artificial Intelligence) initiatives by adopting the Generative AI technologies to enable an intelligent, scalable and exceptional service experience. The team develops and enhances various AI models, ML services and tools including LLM fine-tuning and optimization, RAG/KAG/Search,  LLM evaluation and testing automation, feedback-based learning and guardrail for a wide range of applications in Airbnb. 

The richness of Airbnb's data, the complexity of its marketplace and the variety innate in our product mean that we need to operate at the state of the art of AI practice. We are committed to investing in long term innovation to solve the complex problems we face, and to do that we need the very best experts in ML and AI to join us.

The Difference You Will Make:

As a machine learning engineer or applied scientist, your expertise will be pivotal in developing Conversational AI solutions and other cutting-edge AI techniques to define and shape the future of the Airbnb Community Support experience. You will also partner with product managers, software engineers, and operation teams to leverage AI and engineering innovations to simplify the business requirements into scalable solutions. 

A Typical Day: 

• 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.
• 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.
  

Your Expertise:

• 10+ years of industry experience in applied Machine Learning, inclusive MS or PhD in relevant fields.
• 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. NLP, computer vision, personalization, search and recommendation, marketplace optimization, anomaly detection).
• Strong programming (Scala / Python / Java / C++ or equivalent) and data engineering skills.
• Experience with 3 or more of these technologies: PyTorch, Tensorflow, Kubernetes, Spark, Airflow (or equivalent), Kafka (or equivalent), data warehouse (eg. Hive).
• Industry experience building end-to-end Machine Learning infrastructure and/or building and productionizing Machine Learning models.
• Experience with applying LLMs, prompt design, and fine-tuning methods.
• Exposure to architectural patterns of a large, high-scale software applications (e.g., well-designed APIs, high volume data pipelines, efficient algorithms, models).
• Experience with test driven development, familiar with A/B testing, incremental delivery and deployment.

Your Location:

This position is US - Remote Eligible. The role may include occasional work at an Airbnb office or attendance at offsites, as agreed to with your manager. While the position is Remote Eligible, you must live in a state where Airbnb, Inc. has a registered entity. Click here for the up-to-date list of excluded states. This list is continuously evolving, so please check back with us if the state you live in is on the exclusion list. If your position is employed by another Airbnb entity, your recruiter will inform you what states you are eligible to work from.

Our Commitment To Inclusion & Belonging:

Airbnb is committed to working with the broadest talent pool possible. We believe diverse ideas foster innovation and engagement, and allow us to attract creatively-led people, and to develop the best products, services and solutions. All qualified individuals are encouraged to apply.

We strive to also provide a disability inclusive application and interview process. If you are a candidate with a disability and require reasonable accommodation in order to submit an application, please contact us at: [email protected]. Please include your full name, the role you’re applying for and the accommodation necessary to assist you with the recruiting process. 

We ask that you only reach out to us if you are a candidate whose disability prevents you from being able to complete our online application.