Community Support Forecasting and Demand Planning Analyst

Details

Airbnb's Community Support organization handles tens of millions of customer interactions annually across phone, messaging, chat, email, social media, and back-office channels. The organization is globally distributed and supports issues including cancellations, account issues, refunds, payments, reservations, extenuating circumstances, booking and listing issues, safety, and claims.

This role is responsible for demand forecasting and long-term planning across multi-channel contact center operations for Airbnb's Global Operations team. It combines planning, advanced analytics, and business partnership to support data-driven workforce decisions, service-level objectives, cost optimization, and productivity.

Responsibilities

Demand Forecasting and Statistical Modeling

• Own short-term, mid-term, and long-term demand forecasting across Global Operations teams and channels, including phone, messaging, email, and back-office operations.
• Design, develop, and maintain statistically robust demand forecasting models using time-series and machine learning techniques, including exponential smoothing, ARIMA, and regression-based models.
• Perform trend, seasonality, and variance decomposition; detect structural breaks, outliers, and demand anomalies.
• Quantify forecast uncertainty through confidence intervals, error distributions, and bias analysis.
• Perform scenario modeling for peak demand periods, product launches, growth initiatives, and unplanned demand events.
• Assess model performance using statistical accuracy metrics such as MAPE, RMSE, MAE, and bias.
• Establish model governance standards, including documentation, validation, back-testing, and post-mortem analysis.
• Research, prototype, and implement new forecasting and optimization techniques as business needs evolve.
• Perform scenario planning and sensitivity analysis to quantify trade-offs between service levels, cost, and utilization.

Advanced Analytics

• Partner with Analytics and Data Engineering teams to design and build scalable planning data pipelines and dashboards.
• Automate forecasting and capacity models to improve scalability, repeatability, and timeliness.
• Use SQL and Python to extract, transform, and analyze large-scale operational datasets.
• Monitor forecast accuracy, capacity gaps, utilization, and operational risk.

Decision Support and Stakeholder Communication

• Present forecast assumptions, methodologies, risks, trade-offs, and recommendations in clear, executive-ready formats.
• Act as a trusted advisor to senior leadership and participate in demand and capacity planning discussions in cross-functional forums.
• Align Delivery, Product, Finance, HR, and other stakeholders to embed planning outputs into execution and operational decision-making.
• Identify and implement process improvements, automation, and best practices in demand and capacity planning to optimize cost while maintaining or improving customer experience and service-level outcomes.

Requirements

• 10+ years of experience in demand forecasting, capacity planning, workforce analytics, or applied analytics.
• Bachelor's degree in Mathematics, Statistics, Operations Research, Engineering, Economics, Data Science, or a related quantitative field.
• Strong foundation in probability, statistics, and optimization.
• Hands-on experience building and validating forecasting models, including time-series analysis, exponential smoothing, ARIMA, regression, and hypothesis testing.
• Experience building capacity models using Erlang, queueing theory, service-level modeling, and utilization modeling.
• Strong understanding of contact center metrics, including AHT, ASA, service level, shrinkage, and occupancy.
• Experience supporting large-scale, multi-site, or global contact center environments is preferred.
• Advanced analytical skills and strong proficiency in Excel, Google Sheets, SQL, Python, and data visualization tools such as Tableau.
• Experience with workforce management tools such as NICE, Verint, or Aspect, or planning platforms such as Anaplan, is preferred.
• Strong business acumen and the ability to balance cost efficiency with customer experience outcomes.
• Excellent communication, executive presentation, and stakeholder influence skills, including the ability to explain complex analytical concepts to non-technical audiences.
• Ability to operate in fast-paced, ambiguous, and highly dynamic environments.

Location

• US - Remote Eligible.
• The role may include occasional work at an Airbnb office or attendance at offsites, as agreed with the manager.
• The employee must live in a state where Airbnb, Inc. has a registered entity. If the position is employed by another Airbnb entity, the recruiter will provide information about eligible states.

Benefits

The role may be eligible for bonus, equity, benefits, and Employee Travel Credits. Airbnb is committed to an inclusive and accessible application and interview process.

Compensation

The base pay range is $168,000–$210,000 USD per year. Actual base pay depends on factors including training, transferable skills, work experience, business needs, and market demands.