Staff Machine Learning Engineer - Relevance Research

The Community You Will Join:

The Airbnb Relevance is Airbnb’s personalization and intelligence platform that provides support to our Community of millions of guests and hosts who take trips and join experiences around the world every year. With a deep understanding of guests, Hosts, Trips, and the Airbnb ecosystem, Relevance builds ranking and recommendations (I’m Flexible Category ranking, Split Stays, Search Ranking for Stays and Experiences, Autocomplete, Recommendations on P2, PDP Highlights, and many others surfaces) to enable magical trips at scale. 

Within Relevance, the Intelligent Platform team is responsible for the key  product and technology pillar that enables intelligent, scalable and exceptional AI/ML service experiences across Airbnb.

The Difference You Will Make:

As a senior technical individual contributor, you will bring a unique skill set and experience to our organization, lead the architecture and design of the Relevance Intelligence Platform product, and work to solve some of the broader technical challenges within the organization. You will work both on the overall Relevance Intelligence Platform architecture and future vision for the business, but will also lend expertise to specific teams and deep dive into projects as needed.

Our engineering organization is one where we value everyone’s input and ideas. Although you will be at the Principal level, all individual contributors at Airbnb are Software Engineers, will be expected to be hands on, and contribute code.

A Typical Day: 

• Define overall technical architecture for major parts of the Relevance Intelligent Platform and Product

• Architect large scale reliable Advanced AI/ML Based systems to support continuous growth of the business

• Influence the organization, engineering leaders, product managers, and the business to develop a unified approach to Intelligence Platforms at Airbnb

• 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.

• Understand how key technical decisions will drive business outcomes.

• Perform design and code reviews and advice/mentor other AI/ML engineers at Airbnb.

• Champion the best AI/ML engineering practices and build the engineering excellence culture in the organization.

• 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:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.

• 15 years of technical experience in Applied Machine Learning inclusive MS or PhD in relevant fields, including producing code for a production system and shipping production systems.

• Strong programming (Scala / Python / Java/ C++ or equivalent), data engineering skills and experience with 3 or more of these technologies: Tensorflow, PyTorch, Spark, Kafka

• Deep understanding of Machine Learning best practices (eg training/serving skew minimization, A/B test, feature engineering, feature/model selection), algorithms (eg natural language processing, computer vision, personalization and recommendation, anomaly detection)

• Experience with Machine Learning (AI/ML), including working with training models and developing existing model structures.

• 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.