Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Relevance and Personalization (Query Intelligence)

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.

In this role

youll 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.

The Difference You Will Make

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

Youll 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 Airbnbs 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, with a focus on query understanding.
• Develop query understanding capabilities — autocomplete and smart compose, query tagging (sequence tagging / NER), query expansion, and query/user