Staff Software Engineer, Guest & Host

About 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 Host Pricing & Settings organization is looking for a Staff Software Engineer, Guest & Host to help craft the next generation of tools for Airbnb hosts. Our team empowers Airbnb hosts to better run their business by providing the tools and education to implement pricing strategies that adapt to their evolving goals.

As a Staff Engineer on the Guidance Serving team, you will drive the technical strategy and delivery of advanced online and offline serving systems, enabling seamless and reliable ML model predictions and personalized user experiences. You'll collaborate cross-functionally with Product, Data Science, and ML Engineering to architect scalable solutions with clear domain boundaries, advance feature engineering pipelines, and continuously enhance the performance, efficiency, and impact of our end-to-end machine learning workflows.

A Day in the Life of a Staff Software Engineer, Guest & Host

• Design and manage end-to-end data workflows to support the ML engineering lifecycle, focusing on preparing data for model training, tracking data lineage, evolving schemas to adapt to changing needs, and ensuring data integrity and reliability in production.
• Prototype new ideas and influence the serving strategy.
• Build and optimize real-time serving systems to deliver low-latency, high-throughput APIs for model predictions and personalized recommendations, ensuring reliable and scalable performance in production environments.
• Collaborate with other product engineers and cross-functional partners to develop new Host pricing functionality and surface model recommendations, insights, and analytics.
• Contribute to the development of long-term workflow strategies, roadmaps, and ML serving development within the Host Pricing organization.
• Mentor and coach team members, providing guidance in ML serving and data engineering best practices and support to enhance their skills and performance.
• Ability to work in areas outside of your usual comfort zone and show motivation for personal growth.

What You Bring

• 9+ years of experience with a BS/Masters or 4+ years with a PhD.
• You have experience leading teams, setting technical direction, building & launching high-impact models.
• You have experience influencing partners as well as other engineering teams.
• You exhibit strong ownership and experience building and operating high-scale, distributed systems across the full software life cycle.
• You have excellent communication skills and the ability to work well within a team and across engineering teams.
• Expertise in large-scale distributed data processing frameworks like Presto or Spark.
• Prior experience with the whole lifecycle of productionalization of ML models, including ETL pipelines for data training, feature generation, model evaluation, and real-time serving.
• You are a strong problem solver and have solid production debugging skills.

Key skills/competency

• Machine Learning (ML)
• Distributed Systems
• Data Engineering
• ML Serving
• Real-time Systems
• API Development
• Spark
• Presto
• System Design
• Technical Leadership