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

Details

Airbnb's Relevance and Personalization team builds search and recommendation across the Airbnb platform. In this role you'll focus on query intelligence — turning what a guest types, taps, or says into a precise understanding of intent across autocomplete, smart compose, query tagging, query expansion, and intent modeling for Stays, Experiences, and Services. You will build ML models that parse free-form and 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 focused on query understanding.
• Develop capabilities such as autocomplete and smart compose, sequence tagging / NER for query tagging, query expansion, and intent/user modeling.
• Apply modern NLP and LLMs to power natural-language search experiences ("search in your own words").
• Collaborate with software engineers, product managers, operations, and data scientists to identify business impact, refine requirements, and prioritize models/features.
• Hands-on develop, productionize, and operate ML models and pipelines at scale for both batch and real-time use cases.
• Leverage third-party and in-house ML tools & infrastructure to enable fast model development, low-latency serving, and model quality upkeep.
• Example projects: smart compose and language generation for search, LLM-based sequence taggers, LLM-driven query/location expansion, intent classification, and user-intent sequence modeling.

Requirements

• 5+ years of industry experience in applied Machine Learning; MS or PhD in a relevant field is acceptable.
• Strong programming and data engineering skills (examples: Scala, Python, Java, C++ or equivalent).
• Deep understanding of ML best practices (training/serving skew minimization, A/B testing, feature engineering/selection), algorithms (neural networks / deep learning, optimization), and domains (NLP, personalization, search & recommendation, marketplace optimization).
• Experience with 3 or more of these technologies: TensorFlow, PyTorch, Kubernetes, Spark, Airflow (or equivalent), Kafka (or equivalent), data warehouse (e.g., Hive).
• Industry experience building end-to-end Machine Learning models, including productionization and operation.
• Experience applying large language models and modern NLP (sequence tagging/NER, text generation, intent classification, embedding/representation learning).
• Familiarity with building natural-language, AI-native and agentic search experiences is a plus.
• Exposure to architectural patterns for large, high-scale software applications (well-designed APIs, high-volume data pipelines, efficient algorithms/models).

Location

• US - Remote Eligible. Candidates must live in a state where Airbnb, Inc. has a registered entity. Role may include occasional work at an Airbnb office or attendance at offsites.

Compensation

• Base pay range: $200,000—$235,000 USD. The role may also be eligible for bonus, equity, benefits, and Employee Travel Credits.