Principal Machine Learning Engineer – LLM Fine-Tuning And Optimization

at Airbnb

📍 United States

USD 292,000-365,000 per year

SENIOR

✅ Remote

Tech Stack
Tag name is followed by "@" symbol and proficiency level value. About proficiency levels:

1-2 — basic awareness. Minimal hands-on experience, and a rudimentary understanding of the technology's purpose;

3-6 — daily use. Comfortable and regular usage, capable of handling common tasks and challenges related to the technology;

7-9 — you are an expert, you can teach others, you know all the pitfalls and tricks;

10 — exceptional knowledge, comprehensive understanding, and adeptness in all aspects of the technology, including advanced problem-solving. Think twice before claiming or demanding such level.

AI @ 4 Agile @ 4 Customer Support @ 4 Data Science @ 6 GPU @ 4 GenAI Generative AI @ 4 LLM @ 4 Machine Learning @ 4 Mathematics @ 6 PyTorch @ 4 Python @ 4 RAG Reinforcement Learning @ 4 Statistics @ 6

Details

Airbnb's Customer Support AI product team develops generative AI technologies, AI models, machine learning services, and tools for intelligent, scalable customer service experiences. The team works on LLM fine-tuning, alignment and optimization, RAG and search, LLM evaluation and testing automation, feedback-based learning, and guardrails.

As a Principal Machine Learning Engineer, you will fine-tune state-of-the-art large language models for diverse use cases and optimize models for high-performance deployment on Airbnb's machine learning infrastructure. You will collaborate with product managers, software engineers, data scientists, and operations teams to design and develop AI products such as AI assistants, autonomous agents, recommendation systems, and travel-planning products.

Responsibilities

Work with large-scale structured and unstructured data to explore, experiment with, build, and continuously improve foundation models for Airbnb product, business, and operational use cases.
Create a multi-year technology roadmap that keeps the team at the leading edge of the evolving AI landscape.
Evaluate current and upcoming foundational models and select and refine models for quality, performance, and efficiency.
Prototype, develop, and productionize LLM models and pipelines at scale for batch and real-time use cases.
Drive key AI architectural decisions for products.
Contribute to Airbnb's machine learning platform architecture and strategy.

Requirements

PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Mathematics, Statistics, or a related technical field.
10+ years of experience developing machine learning models and products at scale, from inception to business impact.
Programming experience in Python.
Hands-on experience with frameworks such as PyTorch.
Proven experience training, fine-tuning, and optimizing models and inference runtimes.
Post-training experience in areas such as data processing for fine-tuning, responsible LLMs, LLM alignment, reinforcement learning, efficient training and inference, language model evaluation, and multilingual or multimodal modeling.
Alternatively, specialized experience in runtime optimization, model quantization, compression, on-device inference, GPU inference, PyTorch, or kernel development.

Preferred Qualifications

PhD in AI, machine learning, data science, or a related technical field.
Publications at peer-reviewed AI conferences such as NeurIPS, CVPR, ICML, ICLR, ICCV, or ACL.
Experience applying AI technologies to customer support systems.
Experience with the complete AI product development lifecycle, from incubation to production at scale, using agile practices in applied AI and machine learning.
Experience deploying and scaling business-critical AI services and driving architectural requirements for machine learning infrastructure.

Work Location

This position is US remote eligible. The role may include occasional work at an Airbnb office or attendance at offsites, as agreed with the manager. Candidates must live in a state where Airbnb, Inc. has a registered entity.