Staff Data Scientist - Inference, Customer Support

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:

Airbnb is a mission-driven company dedicated to helping create a world where anyone can belong anywhere. Customer Support (CS) aims to build the world’s most loyal travel community through exceptional service. Personalizing our CS offerings will allow us to meet our customers when and how they need us most.

As a Data Scientist working on Inference in CS, you will have the opportunity to collaborate with a strong team of engineers, product managers, designers and operation agents to build scalable and robust systems to match our services to specific customer needs.  You will be able to create meaningful impact through deep scientific understanding and by designing interventions for Airbnb CS’s most critical challenges.

The Difference You Will Make:

For this role, we’re seeking a causal inference expert to join the Customer Support Data Science team, and have a direct opportunity to contribute, influence, and lead in the CS Personalization space by designing scalable scientific solutions for problems like: 

• Identifying heterogeneous treatment effects which can be used to design tailored experiences.
• Find causal relationships between a customer’s CS experience and long term loyalty
• Develop data driven segmentation strategies which can be automated at scale
• Provide strategic insights around tradeoffs between CS quality and cost to empower us to offer the best possible CS experience to our customers

A Typical Day: 

• Identify high impact business opportunities through data exploration and model prototype, translate business problem into scientific formulations  
• Work collaboratively with cross functional partners including software engineers, product managers, operations and research, to refine requirements for segmentation models, drive scientific decisions, and quantify impact
• Hands-on develop, productionize, and operate causal models and pipelines at scale, including both batch and real-time use cases
• Design and analyze experiments to measure the effectiveness feature launches
• Regularly present work internally at monthly meetings to technical, engineering and product stakeholders to iterate and generate excitement on roadmap progress
• Publish externally and engage with the scientific community to advance Airbnb’s standing

Your Expertise:

• 9+ years of relevant industry experience (e.g. data scientist, tech lead, junior faculty) and a Master’s degree or PhD in relevant fields
• Strong fluency in Python, SQL, and statistical programming such as R
• Deep knowledge of causal inference and experimentation
• Proven ability to communicate clearly and effectively to audiences of varying technical levels
• Proven mix of strong intellectual curiosity with high level of pragmatism and engagement with the technical community. Publications or presentations in recognized journals/conferences is a plus
• Ability to take a product-oriented mindset in using conceptual and innovative thinking to develop and apply solutions taking into consideration the user experience

Preferred Expertise:

• Experience in operational research or personalized marketing models a plus

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 applicat