Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Growth Platform Engineering

Details

The Growth Platform team at Airbnb builds agentic systems and capabilities to support sustained product growth by delivering highly personalized and relevant content and experiences across channels (on- and off-platform). The team powers digital marketing channels (landing pages, email, push, SMS, digital advertising) and the ML/AI and data platforms that feed into campaign management and optimization. The role focuses on developing AI-powered solutions, architectural leadership, and mentorship to evolve foundational building blocks for AI-powered growth systems toward agentic and autonomous capabilities.

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, productionize, and operate ML/AI models and pipelines at scale (batch and real-time).
• Work with large-scale structured and unstructured data: explore, experiment, build, and continuously improve ML models and data pipelines for product, business, and operational use cases.
• Collaborate with cross-functional partners (product managers, operations, data scientists) to identify opportunities, refine requirements, prioritize ML efforts, and drive engineering decisions.
• Leverage third-party and in-house ML tools & infrastructure to enable fast model development, low-latency serving, and maintain model quality.
• Drive architectural decisions for high-scale systems, well-designed APIs, high-volume data pipelines, and efficient algorithms and models.
• Mentor engineers and partner with foundational ML/AI teams to spread ML/AI practices across the organization.
• Contribute to agentic capabilities such as AI-powered content generation, ML/AI orchestration for decisioning, and autonomous marketing analyst agents.

Requirements

• 12+ years of industry experience in applied ML/AI (MS or PhD in a relevant field is indicated).
• Strong programming and data engineering skills; experience with languages such as Scala, Python, Java, or C++.
• Deep understanding of ML/AI best practices (training/serving skew mitigation, feature engineering, feature/model selection, A/B testing).
• Expertise in algorithms and models (gradient boosted trees, neural networks / deep learning, optimization).
• Experience in domains such as natural language processing, computer vision, personalization, search & recommendation, marketplace optimization, and anomaly detection.
• Experience with technologies such as TensorFlow, PyTorch, Kubernetes, Airflow (or equivalent), and Kafka (or equivalent).
• Familiarity with architectural patterns for large, high-scale applications (APIs, high-volume pipelines, efficient algorithms, model serving).

Preferred qualifications:

• Experience developing agentic and automation frameworks for AI-driven processes.
• Experience across the full AI product lifecycle from incubation to production at scale, following agile practices in applied AI/ML.
• Experience building testing frameworks for agent behavior validation and driving architectural requirements for ML infrastructure.

Location

• US — Remote eligible. Candidate 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, as agreed with the manager.

Compensation & Other

• Base pay range: $244,000—$305,000 USD per year.
• Role may be eligible for bonus, equity, benefits, and Employee Travel Credits.

Commitment

• Airbnb is committed to inclusion and belonging and provides a disability-inclusive application and interview process with reasonable accommodations available via [email protected].