Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Guest & Host

Airbnb

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 Growth Platform team’s vision is to drive long term sustainable growth for the Airbnb community. Our mission is to build a best-in-class agentic system, and capabilities to support the growth of all Airbnb products, current and future. We achieve this by delivering highly personalized and relevant content and product experiences to the Airbnb community, both on and off of the Airbnb platform. The north star is full autonomy — where AI identifies opportunities, creates campaigns, personalizes experiences, and optimizes outcomes with minimal human intervention. We are progressing along a deliberate maturity curve: AI assisted → agentic → autonomous, with human-in-the-loop controls at every stage to ensure brand safety, quality, and compliance. The Growth Platform deeply integrates with the Airbnb product, understanding the customer journey and enabling differentiated customer engagement experiences to drive product growth.  The platform also powers digital marketing channels including landing pages, email, push, SMS, and digital advertising, as well as the machine learning/AI and data platforms that feed into the management and optimization of these channels. The Difference You Will Make: * As a machine learning engineer or scientist, your expertise will be pivotal in developing AI-powered solutions to shape the future of the Airbnb agentic growth platform with cutting-edge AI techniques. You will drive and guide the rest of the engineers to brainstorm, design and develop AI products and features from inception to production.  * We're seeking a Senior Staff Engineer who thrives at the intersection of technical depth, architectural thinking, and mentorship. * You’ll collaborate with cross-functional leaders, build resilient systems that operate globally at scale, and help evolve the foundational building blocks behind AI-powered growth systems. Some example projects you will work on: * AI-Powered Content Generation - Developing agentic capabilities to autonomously create personalized emails, push notifications, Ad copy, and creatives. This significantly scales marketing efforts by enabling more campaigns, greater variant testing, and faster iteration cycles. * ML/AI Orchestration for Decisioning - Utilizing AI to determine the optimal audience, message, channel, and timing for communications. This shifts marketing decision-making to model-driven intelligence, enhancing relevance and minimizing message fatigue. The direct impact is an uplift in engagement rates, conversion, and ultimately, bookings. * Proactive Marketing Analyst Agent - Designing an AI agent that autonomously identifies new marketing opportunities and converts them into executable campaigns. It leverages world knowledge, proprietary Airbnb intelligence, and deep customer profiles. A crucial performance-based feedback loop ensures the system continuously learns from campaign outcomes to refine and improve future recommendations. A Typical Day:  * Work with large scale structured and unstructured data; explore, experiment, build and continuously improve Machine Learning models and pipelines for Airbnb product, business and operational use cases. * Work collaboratively with cross-functional partners including product managers, operations and data scientists, to identify opportunities for business impact; understand, refine, and prioritize requirements for machine learning, and drive engineering decisions. * 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 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. * Collaborate actively with engineers to apply ML / AI in their solutions to help validate ideas and guide to the right outcomes. * Partner with ML/AI Engineers in foundations engineering to mentor and develop initiatives that make ML/AI applications a core discipline for non-ML/AI engineers.   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) * Deep understanding of Machine Learning best practices (eg. training/serving skew minimization, A/B test, feature engineering, feature/model selection) and algorithms (eg. gradient boosted trees, neural networks/deep learning, optimization) * Experience with technologies such as: Tensorflow, PyTorch, Kubernetes, Airflow (or equivalent), Kafka (or equivalent) * Expertise with architectural patterns of a large, high-scale software applications (e.g., well-designed APIs, high volume data pipelines, efficient algorithms, models) Preferred Qualifications: * Agentic and Automation: Experience with AI technologies in automating processes and developing agentic solutions and frameworks. * Agile Practice for AI Production: Experience with the entire AI product development lifecycle from incubation to production at scale, following agile practices in the Applied AI/ML domain. * Infrastructure Acumen: Experience building robust testing frameworks for agent behavior validation and continuous improvement, and driving architectural requirements on ML infrastructures 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.   Pay Range $244,000—$305,000 USD

Airbnb

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: Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence are at the heart of the Airbnb product. From Trust to Payments, and from Customer Service to Marketing we rely on ML to ensure that guests and hosts have the best possible experience with Airbnb.  The CS AI product team is responsible for driving CSxAI (Customer Support x Artificial Intelligence) initiatives by adopting the Generative AI technologies to enable an intelligent, scalable and exceptional service experience. The team develops and enhances various AI models, ML services and tools including LLM fine-tuning, alignment and optimization, RAG/Search,  LLM evaluation and testing automation, feedback-based learning and guardrail for a wide range of applications in Airbnb. The Difference You Will Make: As a principle machine learning engineer, you will be responsible for fine-tuning state-of-the-art LLMs for diverse use cases while optimizing models for high-performance deployment on Airbnb’s ML Infrastructure. You will partner with product managers, software engineers, data scientists and operation teams to brainstorm, design and develop AI products such as AI Assistant, Autonomous agent,  recommendation, travel planning, and many more products that make meaningful impacts in the world of travel. A Typical Day:  * Work with large scale structured and unstructured data; explore, experiment, build and continuously improve foundation models for Airbnb product, business and operational use cases. * Create a multi-year tech roadmap that enables our team to stay on the leading edge of the rapidly evolving AI landscape and leverage the best in class technologies to deliver customer benefits. * Continuously evaluate recent and upcoming large foundational models, ensuring the selection and refinement of the highest quality models for enhanced performance and efficiency. * Hands-on prototype, develop and productionize LLM models and pipelines at scale, including both batch and real-time use cases. * Drive key AI architectural decisions for products, and contribute to Airbnb’s ML platform architecture and strategy. Your Expertise: * PhD in Computer Science,  Machine Learning, Mathematics, Statistics, or related technical field. * 10+ years of experience with developing machine learning models and products at scale from inception to business impact. * Programming experience in Python and hands-on experience with frameworks such as PyTorch. * Proven record of training, fine tuning, optimizing models and inference run-time * Post-training experience in areas like data processing for fine-tuning; responsible LLMs; LLM alignment; reinforcement learning; efficient training and inference; language model evaluation; and/or multilingual and multimodal modeling. * Or specialized experience in runtime optimizations, model quantization, compression, on-device inference, GPU inference, pytorch, kernel development 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.   Pay Range $248,000—$310,000 USD

Airbnb

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: Everyone at Airbnb thinks about trust, but our team obsesses over it daily. At the core of trust is safety, and thus we spend a significant amount of our time and energy keeping the community safe. The Trust team is responsible for developing the technology that helps protect our community and platform from fraud while also ensuring our hosts, guests, homes, and experiences meet our high standards. We constantly work to fight against online fraud (such as monetary loss, compromised accounts, spam and scam in messages, fake inventory, etc.) as well as offline fraud (theft, property damage, personal safety, etc.). We also work on onboarding and screening of users, and think about complex topics like identity and reputation to ensure that every interaction with Airbnb helps build trust in us and our community. Trust Engineering is responsible for the technology vision and development of a complex stack that runs on every key interaction on the platform. Trust Engineering is at the forefront of AI and ML innovation, helping develop novel techniques and advancing the state-of-art in Machine Learning to continually build and maintain trust across our platform. The Difference You Will Make: As a senior technical individual contributor, you will partner closely with our leaders across the broader technical organization helping design, execute and deliver in a complex and collaborative roadmap of Trust engineering efforts that will require collaboration across many parts of the organization and many parts of Airbnb. Although you will be at one of our highest levels of seniority, all individual contributors at Airbnb are Software Engineers which means we expect you to be hands on and contribute code. A Typical day: * Define and execute on the long-term ML technical vision and strategy for the Trust organization, identifying key investments, architecting scalable solutions, and championing best practices that advance the state-of-the-art in production ML systems. * Serve as a technical leader and mentor to other ML and software engineers across the organization, providing guidance on complex architectural and modeling challenges, and raising the overall technical bar. * Drive and deliver large-scale, multi-quarter ML initiatives that span multiple teams, influencing roadmaps and ensuring alignment between platform and product * 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. * Work closely with other trust defense and platform teams to tackle the changing landscape of fraud attacks. * Hands-on develop, productionize, and operate Machine Learning models and pipelines at scale, including both batch and real-time use cases. * Examples include: Anomaly detection models, ML models for continuous risk evaluation, Multimodality and Agentic AI Your Expertise: * 12+ years of industry experience in applied Machine Learning * 2-3+ years working with LLMs and novel GenAI technologies. Proficiency and proven experience on Agentic AI (frameworks, orchestration, architecture and productionization). * A Bachelor’s, Master’s or PhD in CS/ML or related field * 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. gradient boosted trees, neural networks/deep learning, optimization) and domains (eg. genAI, Agentic AI, natural language processing, computer vision, personalization and recommendation, anomaly detection) * Experience with  these technologies: AgenticAI, Tensorflow, PyTorch, Kubernetes,  * Industry experience building end-to-end Machine Learning and Agentic infrastructure and/or building and productionizing Machine Learning 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. * Experience with the Trust and Risk domain is 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 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.   Pay Range $244,000—$305,000 USD