Senior Data Scientist, Guest Travel Insurance (Algorithms)

Details

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

Airbnb is a mission-driven company dedicated to helping create a world where anyone can belong anywhere. Travel should feel safe—and AirCover is how we deliver on that promise. Through Guest Travel Insurance (GTI), we offer guests peace of mind at the moment of booking and throughout their trip. As a Data Scientist on AirCover, you’ll work at the intersection of insurance, personalization, and machine learning—building intelligent systems that help the right guest discover the right coverage at the right moment. You’ll join a tight-knit, high-output DS team that runs one of Airbnb’s most experiment-dense personalization roadmaps, partnering daily with product, engineering, operations, and legal to ship work that directly affects guest trust and revenue.

Responsibilities

• Build end-to-end machine learning systems from prototype to production for personalization and recommendation of insurance products (trip cancellation, accidental damage coverage, on-trip protection).
• Evolve rule-based guest segmentation into full ML recommendation systems that surface the right insurance to each guest based on purchase intent, trip attributes, listing signals, and user history.
• Build models to rank and select benefit messaging for each guest—deciding which coverages to highlight, in what order, and with what framing; draw on segmentation experiments and LLM-assisted content prototyping.
• Develop and productionize ML models (from gradient-boosted trees to deep learning) that predict a guest’s likelihood to value specific coverages using structured booking data and unstructured signals.
• Leverage reinforcement learning to personalize across the user journey, optimizing entry point, price, notification frequency, and trip characteristics.
• Design and run adaptive experiments and sequence ERFs to maximize learning under traffic constraints; use A/B testing, multi-armed bandits, and other experimentation techniques.
• Work cross-functionally with product, engineering, operations, legal, and privacy partners to align on ML requirements, explainability, and compliance.
• Present findings and proposals to technical, product, and executive stakeholders; keep current with research in recommendation systems, LLMs, and personalization; occasionally publish or present externally.

Requirements

• 5+ years of relevant industry experience (e.g., ML scientist, tech lead, junior faculty) and a Master’s degree or PhD with 2+ years in a relevant field.
• Proven hands-on experience building and shipping personalization and recommendation systems at scale, with strong intuition for feature engineering, user modeling, and the full ML lifecycle (training, serving, monitoring, iteration).
• Strong fluency in Python and SQL.
• Hands-on experience with TensorFlow or PyTorch, Airflow, and a data warehouse environment.
• Deep understanding of ML algorithms (gradient-boosted trees, deep learning, optimization) and experiment design—including A/B testing, multi-armed bandits; causal inference skills are a plus.
• Experience or interest in LLMs, computer vision, and content-understanding topics is a strong plus.
• Exceptional written and verbal communication skills; ability to make complex ML work legible to engineers, product, legal, and executives.
• Self-directed, product-oriented, and able to move quickly from prototype to production; publications or presentations in recognized venues are a plus.

Location

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

How We'll Take Care of You / Benefits

• Base pay range: $179,000—$210,000 USD. This role may also be eligible for bonus, equity, benefits, and Employee Travel Credits. The actual base pay depends on factors such as training, transferable skills, work experience, business needs, and market demands.

Inclusion & Accessibility

• Airbnb is committed to diversity and an inclusive hiring process. Candidates requiring reasonable accommodation for the application or interview process are encouraged to contact [email protected] with their full name, the role, and requested accommodation.