Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Relevance and Personalization (Query Intelligence)

Details

The Relevance and Personalization team is responsible for search and recommendation across Airbnb's digital platform. This role focuses on query intelligence, including autocomplete and smart compose, query tagging, query expansion, and intent modeling across Stays, Experiences, and Services.

The role involves building AI technologies across the end-to-end search ranking product stack, including data pipelines, feature and model innovation, serving and experimentation efficiency, and the use of structured, sequential, image, and text data. You will develop models that parse free-form and natural-language multimodal queries, extract entities and location context, classify intent, and anticipate user needs.

Responsibilities

• Work with large-scale structured and unstructured data to build and continuously improve machine learning models for product, business, and operational use cases, with a focus on query understanding.
• Develop query-understanding capabilities, including autocomplete and smart compose, sequence tagging and named entity recognition, query expansion, query and user intent modeling, and natural-language search experiences powered by modern NLP and large language models.
• Collaborate with software engineers, product managers, operations, and data scientists to identify opportunities for business impact, refine and prioritize machine learning requirements, drive engineering decisions, and quantify impact.
• Develop, productionize, and operate machine learning models and pipelines at scale for batch and real-time use cases.
• Leverage third-party and in-house machine learning tools and infrastructure to build reusable, high-performing systems with fast model development, low-latency serving, and maintainable model quality.
• Work on projects such as smart compose and language generation for search, LLM-based sequence taggers, LLM-driven query and location expansion, intent classification, and user-intent sequence modeling.

Requirements

• 5+ years of industry experience in applied machine learning, inclusive of an MS or PhD in relevant fields.
• Strong programming and data engineering skills in Scala, Python, Java, C++, or equivalent.
• Deep understanding of machine learning best practices, including training-serving skew minimization, A/B testing, feature engineering, and feature and model selection.
• Knowledge of neural networks, deep learning, optimization, natural language processing, personalization, search and recommendation, and marketplace optimization.
• Experience with at least three of the following technologies: TensorFlow, PyTorch, Kubernetes, Spark, Airflow or equivalent, Kafka or equivalent, and data warehouses such as Hive.
• Industry experience building end-to-end machine learning models.
• Experience applying large language models and modern NLP, including sequence tagging and NER, text generation, intent classification, or embedding and representation learning.
• Familiarity with natural-language, AI-native, and agentic search experiences is a plus.
• Exposure to architectural patterns for large-scale software applications, including well-designed APIs, high-volume data pipelines, efficient algorithms, and models.

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. Employees 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 provides an inclusive application and interview process and reasonable accommodation for candidates with disabilities.