Senior/Staff/Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer

Airbnb was born in 2007 when two hosts welcomed three guests to their San Francisco home, and has since grown to over 5 million hosts who have welcomed over 2 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:

The Machine Learning team at Airbnb is responsible for search and recommendation across the entire Airbnb digital platform. Be a leader in the team working on critical, impactful projects with focus on developing end-to-end ranking algorithms and ecosystems for optimizing multiple critical business objectives. We build cutting-edge AI technologies across the end-to-end search ranking product stack w.r.t. data pipelines, feature and model innovations, serving and experimentation efficiency, leveraging rich signals from various types of data (structured, sequential, image, text, etc) at Airbnb. We collaborate closely with teams across Airbnb to develop the ranking solutions and support a healthy marketplace for hosts and guests to further Airbnb’s mission of creating a world where people can Belong Anywhere

The Core Machine Learning team is the core team responsible for driving CSxAI (Customer Support x Artificial Intelligence) initiatives by adopting the Generative AI to enable an intelligent, scalable and exceptional service experience. The team develops and enhances task-specific Large-Language-Models (e.g. Text Summarization models, Multi-turn Dialogue Language models) and foundational machine learning models (e.g. Named-Entity Recognition, Sentiment modeling) for a wide range of applications in Airbnb. Here are some Medium posts from the team: How AI Text Generation Models Are Reshaping Customer Support at Airbnb, Task-Oriented Conversational AI in Airbnb Customer Support.

The Difference You Will Make:

As a machine learning engineer, your expertise will be pivotal in developing Conversational AI solutions and other cutting-edge Machine learning 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 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.
• Example projects include: feature platform, model interpretability, hyperparameter optimization, concept drift detection.

Your Expertise:

• 5+ 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 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. 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 (eg. Hive).
• Industry experience building end-to-end Machine Learning infrastructure and/or building and productionizing Machine Learning models.
• Exposure to architectural patterns of a large, high-scal