Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Post Training

Details

Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence are central to Airbnb's product. The Customer Support AI product team develops Generative AI technologies, AI models, ML services, and tools for intelligent and scalable customer support experiences, including LLM fine-tuning, alignment and optimization, RAG/Search, LLM evaluation, testing automation, feedback-based learning, and guardrails.

As a Principal Machine Learning Engineer, you will fine-tune state-of-the-art LLMs for diverse use cases and optimize models for high-performance deployment on Airbnb's ML 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 solutions.

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 to keep the team at the forefront of the evolving AI landscape and leverage best-in-class technologies.
• Evaluate recent and upcoming large 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 ML 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 through business impact.
• Programming experience in Python.
• Hands-on experience with frameworks such as PyTorch.
• Proven experience training, fine-tuning, optimizing, and improving model inference runtime.
• 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.

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 a bonus, equity, benefits, and Employee Travel Credits. Airbnb supports an inclusive application and interview process and provides reasonable accommodations for candidates with disabilities.

Compensation

The base pay range is $248,000–$310,000 USD. Actual base pay depends on factors including training, transferable skills, work experience, business needs, and market demands.