Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Query Intelligence at Airbnb in United States

Job description

• The Relevance and Personalization team at Airbnb is responsible for search and recommendation across the entire Airbnb digital platform. In this role you'll focus on query intelligence, the front door of search working on critical, impactful projects that turn what a guest types, taps, or says into a precise understanding of their intent, spanning autocomplete and smart compose, query tagging, query expansion, and intent modeling across Stays, Experiences, and Services.
• Query understanding is where every search begins, and it directly shapes retrieval, ranking, and ultimately the perfect match between guests and hosts.
• 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) and increasingly large language models at Airbnb.
• You'll build the models that parse free-form and natural-language multimodal queries, extract entities and location context, classify intent, and anticipate what guests want before they finish typing.
• 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

Responsibilities

• 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, with a focus on query understanding.
• Develop query understanding capabilities — autocomplete and smart compose, query tagging (sequence tagging / NER), query expansion, and query/user intent modeling — and natural-language ("search in your own words") search experiences powered by modern NLP and LLMs.
• 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: smart compose and language generation for search, LLM-based sequence taggers, LLM-driven query/location expansion, intent classification, and user-intent sequence modeling.

Requirements

• 5+ 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, personalization, search and recommendation, marketplace optimization).
• 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 models.
• Experience applying large language models and modern NLP — e.g., sequence tagging/NER, text generation, intent classification, or embedding/representation learning.
• Familiarity with building natural-language, AI-native and agentic search experiences is a plus.
• Exposure to architectural patterns of large, high-scale software applications (e.g., well-designed APIs, high volume data pipelines, efficient algorithms, models).

Skills

Required

• Scala
• Python
• Java
• C++
• Tensorflow
• PyTorch
• Kubernetes
• Spark
• Airflow
• Kafka
• Hive
• Machine Learning

Preferred

• Natural-language search experiences
• AI-native search
• Agentic search

Benefits

• 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
• $200,000—$235,000 USD