Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer

Summary

Join Airbnb’s Relevance and Personalization team and shape the discovery experience for over 150M global users. Lead projects powering search and recommendations across the Airbnb platform, influencing how guests and hosts connect. Design and deploy cutting-edge ranking algorithms and robust systems optimizing key business goals. Work with diverse data sources (structured, behavioral, image, text) to create intelligent signals driving relevance and personalized recommendations. Collaborate with engineers, data scientists, product managers, and designers to develop holistic solutions for a vibrant and equitable marketplace. Advance Airbnb’s mission to create a world where anyone can belong anywhere. This role involves hands-on development, production, and operation of ML/AI models and pipelines at scale.

Requirements

• 12+ years of industry experience in applied ML/AI, inclusive MS or PhD in relevant fields
• Strong programming (Scala / Python / Java / C++ or equivalent) and data engineering skills
• 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)
• 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
• 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

Responsibilities

• Work with large scale structured and unstructured data, 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, 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 ML/AI models and pipelines at scale, including both batch and real-time use cases
• 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

Benefits

This role may also be eligible for bonus, equity, benefits, and Employee Travel Credits