Machine Learning Engineer,Sr. -Remote

Airbnb is seeking a Senior Machine Learning Engineer to join the Relevance and Personalization team, with a focus on Query Intelligence. This team powers search and recommendation experiences across Airbnb’s platform.

In this role, you will work on the front door of search, transforming what guests type, tap, or say into a precise understanding of their intent. Your work will span autocomplete and smart compose, query tagging, query expansion, and intent modeling across Stays, Experiences, and Services.

You will develop machine learning systems that understand free-form, natural-language, and multimodal queries while helping improve retrieval, ranking, personalization, and the overall guest experience.

Key Responsibilities

• Work with large-scale structured and unstructured data to develop and continuously improve machine learning models for product, business, and operational use cases.
• Build query understanding capabilities including autocomplete, smart compose, query tagging, sequence tagging, named entity recognition, query expansion, and query/user intent modeling.
• Develop natural-language search experiences powered by modern NLP and large language models.
• Build models that extract entities and location context, classify search intent, and anticipate guest needs.
• Collaborate with software engineers, product managers, operations teams, and data scientists to identify opportunities for business impact.
• Translate product and business requirements into machine learning solutions and help prioritize model development.
• Make engineering decisions and quantify the impact of machine learning systems.
• Develop, productionize, and operate machine learning models and pipelines at scale for both batch and real-time applications.
• Leverage internal and third-party ML tools and infrastructure to create reusable, high-performing systems.
• Improve model development velocity, serving latency, reliability, and ongoing model quality.
• Contribute to projects involving smart compose and language generation, LLM-based sequence tagging, query and location expansion, intent classification, and user-intent sequence modeling.

• 5+ years of industry experience in applied machine learning, including relevant experience gained through an MS or PhD.
• Strong programming and data engineering skills in Scala, Python, Java, C++, or equivalent languages.
• Deep understanding of machine learning best practices, including feature engineering, model and feature selection, training/serving skew reduction, and A/B testing.
• Strong knowledge of machine learning algorithms, including neural networks, deep learning, and optimization.
• Experience in areas such as natural language processing, personalization, search and recommendation, or marketplace optimization.
• Experience with at least three of the following or equivalent technologies:
• TensorFlow
• PyTorch
• Kubernetes
• Spark
• Airflow
• Kafka
• Data warehouses such as Hive
• Experience building and deploying end-to-end machine learning models in industry.
• Experience applying large language models and modern NLP techniques, including sequence tagging/NER, text generation, intent classification, or embedding and representation learning.
• Familiarity with architectural patterns used in large-scale software applications, including well-designed APIs, high-volume data pipelines, efficient algorithms, and scalable machine learning systems., * Experience building natural-language and AI-native search experiences.
• Familiarity with agentic search systems and architectures.
• Experience working with large-scale search, recommendation, personalization, or marketplace optimization systems.
• Strong understanding of production ML infrastructure and scalable model serving.

Airbnb is a global platform connecting millions of hosts and guests through unique stays and experiences around the world. Since its founding in 2007, Airbnb has grown to more than 5 million hosts and over 2 billion guest arrivals across nearly every country.