Senior Data Scientist - Algorithms, Guest Merchandising

The Community You Will Join:

Search is pivotal to the Airbnb marketplace and Understanding Who are our Guests and What they want is at the heart of providing thoughtful personalization and a high quality user experience. The core of the Airbnb platform is hospitality and we aim to become the ultimate host for our users at every detail. To achieve such a goal the Data Science team mines various collections of behavioral data to design and build machine learning models to understand our user experience and to optimize the useful presentation of our product. This derived understanding of our users informs product improvements that make the steps from search to booking easy and fast for guests.

The Difference You Will Make:

As a senior Machine Learning Scientist you will be the hands-on data scientist for prototyping AI and ML recommendations for displaying relevant information to guide our users in their decision-making over the guest journey. The data artifacts you will create own and showcase will help to drive a more customized user experience based on unlocking new and deeper understanding of our users and listings:

• Work closely with partners on a holistic decision-making engine for displaying the end-to-end user experience

• Build data products and models to produce contextual insights relevant at various stages of the user product journey

• Collaborate with a strong team of engineers to improve barriers and frictions in our online user experience

Our team works on interesting problems across a diverse collection of Airbnb’s largest datasets and we are committed to applying innovation and creativity towards extracting a foundational understanding of our user amidst the richness and heterogeneity of their complex behaviors and preferences.

A Typical Day:

• Focus time – To build machine learning prototypes develop data mastery to uncover learnings and formulate structured frameworks to classify our users’ online product experience and interpret their behaviors

• Autonomy – To apply and investigate state-of-the-art innovations to uplevel Airbnb status-quo approaches to technical problems

• Regularly present work internally at monthly meetings to technical engineering and product stakeholders to iterate and generate excitement on roadmap progress

Your Expertise:

• 5+ years of relevant industry experience (e.g. ML scientist tech lead junior faculty) and a Master’s degree or PhD in a quantitative field

• Hands-on ‘builder’ experience with recommendations and search problems. Also a plus proficiency with LLMs and/or related AI NLP UGC/content understanding topics including deep learning information retrieval or knowledge extraction. For example BERT LaMDA GPT-2/3/4 LLaMA

• Strong fluency in Python or R for hands-on IC work and advanced data analysis in SQL at scale

• Comfort to collaborate with software engineers to understand complex systems and abstracted logs

• Proven ability to communicate clearly and effectively to audiences of varying technical levels

• Publications or presentations in recognized journals/conferences demonstrating an eagerness to learn and share. Proven mix of strong intellectual curiosity with high level of pragmatism and engagement with the technical community.

• Ability to take a product-oriented mindset in using conceptual and innovative thinking to develop and apply solutions taking into consideration the user experience

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: [email protected] . 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.