Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Relevance and Personalization

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: 

Join Airbnb’s Relevance and Personalization team, where you’ll have a unique opportunity to shape the discovery experience for over 150M global users! You’ll take the lead on projects that power search and recommendations across the entire Airbnb platform—directly influencing how guests and hosts connect in meaningful ways. Come design and deploy state-of-the-art ranking algorithms, deploying robust systems that optimize Airbnb’s most important business goals. 

Our team pushes the boundaries of AI and machine learning throughout the search ranking stack, from data pipelines to feature engineering, model innovation, real-time serving, and large-scale experimentation. You’ll work hands-on with diverse data sources—structured, behavioral, image, and text—transforming raw information into intelligent signals that drive relevance and personalized recommendations.

Collaboration lies at the heart of our culture. You’ll partner with talented engineers, data scientists, product managers, and designers from across Airbnb to develop holistic solutions that ensure a vibrant and equitable marketplace. Together, we’re dedicated to advancing Airbnb’s mission to create a world where anyone can belong anywhere.

Some past publications from the team can be found here: https://sites.google.com/view/airbnb-relevance-publications/home

A Typical Day: 

• 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.
• Example projects include: feature platform, model interpretability, hyperparameter optimization, concept drift detection.

Your Expertise:

• 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.

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 application and interview process. If you are a candidate with a disability and require reasonable accommodation in order to submit an application, please contact us at: reasonableaccommodations@airbnb.com. Please include your full name, the role you’re applying for and the accommodation necessary to assist you with the recruiting process. 

We ask that you only reach out to us if you are a candidate whose disability prevents you from being able to complete our online application.

How We'll Take Care of You:

Our job titles may span more than one career level. The actual base pay is dependent upon many factors, such as: training, transferable skills, work experience, business needs and market demands. The base pay range is subject to change and may be modified in the future. This role may also be eligible for bonus, equity, benefits, and Employee Travel Credits.