Staff Software Engineer, ML Infrastructure

The Difference You Will Make:

At Airbnb, our mission is to create a world where anyone can belong anywhere. We use Machine Learning & Artificial Intelligence extensively across our product to create a more connected, empowered, and safer global community and enable an intelligent & worry-free travel experience.

In this role, you’ll help us build the ML & AI Platform for Airbnb - the central tools & infrastructure that powers use cases across the company -  ranging from Guest & Host, Search Ranking & Relevance, Trust & Safety, Community Support, Payments and more. You’ll work side-by-side with partner teams to deliver high-impact product wins.  You’ll also join us in evolving Airbnb into an AI-first company by pioneering the area of GenAI infrastructure.

A Typical Day: 

You’ll have the opportunity to work on a wide variety of projects that support the AI/ML lifecycle from ideation to production, including:

• Build Framework/cloud-agnostic advanced Infra to meet GenAI demands so that Airbnb can: consolidate diverse Large Foundation Model services; enforce Airbnb policies for trustworthy and seamless integration; provide the most performant training and serving capabilities; and hasten fine-tuning, benchmarking, evaluation & intuitive prompt engineering - to foster Airbnb AI innovation and efficiency.
• Build and optimize scalable batch and streaming computing systems to power ML Feature Engineering for state-of-the-art ML models, leveraging leading edge frameworks, innovative algorithms, techniques and hardware available. Build and optimize scalable and efficient backbones of Data Centric AI including but not limited to embedding platform and AI/ML observability.
• Create scalable human & AI-powered labeling infrastructure to power data-driven product features (e.g. Categories), ML modeling, and GenAI fine tuning / RLHF - smoothly integrating humans and AI in the most effective way.
• Create highly optimized ML & AI Training, Fine Tuning and Serving infrastructure, leveraging the latest in hardware & software enhancements to deliver world-class performance for Airbnb’s demanding applications.
• Create the ML/AI Workflow automation, orchestration, and metadata tracking layer that increases productivity and quality of the 300+ ML Engineers and Data Scientists who rely on us.
• Use OSS technologies such as Ray, MLFlow, Tensorflow, PyTorch, LangChain, Airflow, Spark, Docker, Kubernetes, etc.
  

Your Expertise:

• 9+ years of industry experience (and/or relevant academic experience).
• Solid understanding of engineering and infrastructure best practices.
• Strong coding skills in Python/Java or equivalent.
• Strong Experience and knowledge of distributed systems.
• Industry experience building end-to-end Machine Learning Platforms is a plus.
• Experience developing and productionizing machine learning models is a plus.
• Experience with Kubernetes, Spark, Docker, Airflow and stream processing technologies such as Flink is a plus.
• Practical experience developing applications using Open AI’s GPT, and a sound understanding of various versions of GPT (and other models) and Open AI APIs is a plus.
• Experience in fine tuning and serving OSS LLM models such as LLAMA 2, Mistral, etc is a plus.
  

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: reasonableaccommodations@airbnb.com. 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.