Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Relevance and Personalization

airbnb, Inc.; Northern (KY); Hybrid; USD 190,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

Airbnb seeks a Staff Machine Learning Engineer for the Relevance and Personalization team in the United States. You will lead end-to-end ranking models, collaborate with software engineers, PMs, and data scientists, and productionize ML pipelines at scale to optimize search and recommendations across the platform.

The role focuses on building cutting-edge AI systems using structured and unstructured data, with emphasis on impactful business objectives and a scalable infrastructure.

Qualifications

• Minimum 9+ years of industry experience in applied machine learning.
• Strong programming in Scala, Python, Java, or C++ with data engineering skills.
• Advanced degree or equivalent in relevant fields (MS/PhD).
• Experience with end-to-end ML systems and ranking/recommendation domains.

Responsibilities

• Develop and productionize ML models and pipelines at scale.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to drive impact and requirements.
• Hands-on model development, serving, and real-time/batch processing.
• Leverage in-house and third-party tools to build high-performing systems.

Skills

Industry experience

Programming

Data engineering

ML fundamentals

NLP/vision/recs domain knowledge

Education

MS or PhD in relevant field

Tools

TensorFlow

PyTorch

Kubernetes

Spark

Airflow

Kafka

Hive

Job description

Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Relevance and Personalization

United States

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 Relevance and Personalization 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.

The Difference You Will Make:

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. 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 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.

Your Expertise:

• 9+ 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-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.
  

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: [e-mail] . 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.