Staff Data Scientist, Algorithms, Martech

Airbnb was born in 2007 when two Hosts welcomed three guests to their San Francisco home, and has since grown to over 4 million Hosts who have welcomed more than 1 billion guest arrivals in almost every country across the globe. Every day, Hosts offer unique stays and experiences that make it possible for guests to connect with communities in a more authentic way.

The Community You Will Join:

Marketing Technology focuses on building the best-in-class personalization and measurement capabilities to enable marketing and differentiated treatment at Airbnb. We build solutions used by our stakeholders across the company, including Marketing, Guest Experience, Host, Trust, Payments, Product, Customer Service, and more. Our Mission is to enable marketing and product teams to effectively deliver timely, personalized, and relevant marketing communications as well as differentiated treatment, both on-site and off-site.

The Difference You Will Make:

As a senior-level Data Scientist on the team, you will be hands-on in researching, designing, and prototyping solutions that enable advanced personalization based on each user’s unique interests and needs. These preferences can be gleaned from structured and unstructured data sources (site events, stay reviews, listing descriptions, etc.).  

Our team works on interesting problems across a diverse collection of Airbnb’s largest datasets. We are committed to developing innovative solutions that can inform a foundational understanding of our users’ heterogeneous behaviors and preferences. Projects will leverage AI, LLMs, and advanced segmentation algorithms to inform personalized marketing campaigns and develop marketing strategies using generative AI. 

We are looking for an entrepreneurial spirit to apply existing and new data science and ML methodologies to create new ways of understanding the Customer’s Journey and then applying that knowledge to improve the user experience.  As part of this process, you will

• Extract signals from large-scale structured, unstructured, and click-stream data to generate insights for improving the targeting and efficiency of Airbnb communications and actions. 
• Work with our business partners to translate insights into actions and build tests to demonstrate and measure the efficacy of those actions.
• Demonstrate good judgment in selecting and evaluating methods and techniques for obtaining solutions. 
• Design, run, and diagnose experiments to validate hypotheses and performance of data prototypes 
• Design systems to optimize marketing engagement with users. 
• Work closely with the ML Engineering team as a science partner to prototype machine learning use cases for use in the product, and work with stakeholders to iterate on requirements.
• Build data products to understand users’ intentions and preferences at various stages of the user-product journey
• Research, present, and publish internally and externally, to engage and advance Airbnb’s standing in the scientific community.

A Typical Day:

• Focus time – Build machine learning prototypes, develop data mastery to uncover learnings, and formulate structured frameworks to classify our users’ online product experience and interpret their behaviors
• Autonomy – Apply and investigate state-of-the-art innovations to uplevel Airbnb status-quo approaches to technical problems
• Influence – Clearly scope the technical solutions, milestones of long term innovative projects and align with stakeholders for adoption. 
• Communicate - Regularly present work internally in 1:1’s as well as  monthly meetings to technical, engineering and product stakeholders.  Inform our business partners and stake holders on our progress, generate excitement on roadmap and build collaborations.
• Mentorship – Provide technical guidance to junior team members and be accountable for the project outcome. 
• Publish externally and engage with the scientific community to advance Airbnb’s standing

Your Expertise:

• 9+ years of relevant industry experience (e.g. ML scientist, tech lead, junior faculty) and a Master’s degree or PhD in a quantitative field
• Working experience in marketing.
• Deep understanding of personalization.
• Ability to model the customer journey using mechanisms, such as Markov Models, that combine a knowledge of the customer’s current state along with future potential states.
• Hands-on experience with Machine Learning best practices (e.g. training/serving skew minimization, A/B test, feature engineering, feature/model selection) and algorithms (eg. gradient boosted trees, neural networks/deep learning, optimization).
• Hands on experience with large language models, i.e. BERT, LaMDA, GPT-2/3/4, LLaMa