Senior Web Software Engineer, Data Science Prototyping

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 Data Science team works closely with partners from Design, Product and Engineering across Airbnb’s product portfolio. Our work involves 0-to-1 innovation, applying sophisticated modeling techniques to critical Airbnb problems and finding new ways to leverage science for the good of the Airbnb community. Web prototypers work with Data Scientists to identify key questions during the development of these new solutions and build software prototypes that answer them. The work of DS prototyping covers everything from designing the right data visualization to focused explorations that help solve key design questions to broad explorations that help validate ideas.

The Difference You Will Make:

This role is focussed on partnering with the Data Science team to develop prototypes that show the potential of new data models targeting critical business and user problems. Step change advances in ML/AI have the potential to transform Airbnb, but doing that well requires not just building the right models, but also creating the right experience -- your work will be critical in enabling us to do that.

Sophisticated and impactful models are often complex and hard to understand -- by building effective prototypes you can help close that gap and allow innovation to flourish. Your prototypes will enable leadership to make critical and strategic business decisions by demonstrating technical feasibility, suggesting implementation approaches, enabling user studies, and more.

A Typical Day:

As a web prototyper, you will create prototypes that enable differentiating and industry-leading product enhancements and introduce the application of advanced and emerging technologies. In this role you will:

• Co-develop prototypes with Data Scientists, partnering with them to talk through proposed data models, identify open questions, and plan the most effective ways to answer those questions and showcase the results to various stakeholders.
• Choose implementation approaches that strike an appropriate balance between speed and realism that will enable your prototypes to provide answers with sufficient confidence as quickly as possible
• Build APIs that provide data from backend systems for use in your own and in other prototypes
• Guide data scientists in building their own prototypes to address their open questions and demonstra