Staff Machine Learning Engineer, AI Translation

Summary

Join Airbnb's Translation AI team as a Staff ML Engineer and play a key role in developing and deploying machine translation capabilities globally. Collaborate with various teams to enhance the guest booking experience and communication between hosts and guests. Design and implement scalable machine translation models, focusing on accuracy, cost reduction, and latency improvement. Develop tooling and infrastructure for data preparation, evaluation, model selection, training, and inference. Leverage cutting-edge open-source models and commercial translation offerings. Contribute to building the future of AI at Airbnb.

Requirements

• 9+ 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 familiarity with machine learning development practices, especially for language modeling & NLP applications
• Prior experience with deploying or supporting production ML systems at large scale - including operational experience on observability, continuous evaluation and improvement, progressive rollouts
• Familiarity with OSS tools and technologies such as: PyTorch, LlamaFactory, HuggingFace, NVidia Triton / TRTLLM, Ray
• Strong communication and cross-team collaboration skills

Responsibilities

• Collaborate closely with teams across Airbnb—such as Customer Support, Guest & Host Tools, etc. — to deliver powerful machine translation capabilities for the entire company
• Partner with teams to identify and prioritize translation-related challenges and opportunities
• Design and implement scalable machine translation models to improve accuracy and reduce cost and latency for Airbnb’s global platform
• Develop tooling, pipelines, and low level infrastructure (in collaboration with the ML Infrastructure team) that ensures we have a flexible foundation for machine translation spanning data preparation, evaluation, model selection / training, and inference
• Work with cutting-edge open-source models including Llama, as well as commercial Translation offerings

Preferred Qualifications

• Passionate about GenAI with a strong grasp of current trends in LLMs and related technologies
• Deep understanding of GenAI models and their strengths/weaknesses, and ability to define the criteria for the right models/technologies to use to balance tradeoffs between quality, cost, performance, ease of operation and extensibility

Benefits

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