Senior Data Engineer, ML Infrastructure

The Community You Will Join:

At Airbnb, our mission is to create a world where anyone can belong anywhere. We use Data and Machine Learning extensively to create a more connected, empowered, and safer global community and enable an intelligent & worry-free travel experience. ML Infrastructure, which is the team you will join in, is tasked to provide common shared foundations for modeling, data, governance and productivity to ensure Airbnb’s AI/ML models and applications are built with the highest standards in the industry.

The Difference You Will Make:

As part of our team, you'll build the essential AI/ML data foundations powering all AI/ML use cases across Airbnb—spanning Trust & Safety, Payments, Customer Support, Marketing, Search Ranking, and more. You’ll define and implement industry-leading best practices, pipelines, and tools to streamline data creation and consumption, ensuring efficiency, consistency, and compliance. Your contributions will significantly accelerate AI/ML innovation, enabling rapid development and deployment of high-quality, impactful AI/ML solutions company-wide. Additionally, you'll play a pivotal role in shaping our cutting-edge Generative AI infrastructure, positioning AI at the heart of Airbnb’s future.

A Typical Day: 

• Design, build, automate, and maintain robust, scalable data pipelines using SparkSQL, Scala, and Airflow.
• Develop and optimize data models ensuring high-quality, consistent, and accurate data to support broad AI/ML product feature decisions.
• Collaborate closely with peer ML Infra teams to deliver automated data solutions driving AI/ML acceleration.
• Contribute to scalable GenAI infrastructure by leveraging foundational language and vision models to create high quality datasets that power cutting edge GenAI applications.
• Partner with key customer teams to deliver high-impact, high-quality datasets core to Airbnb's roadmap.
• Utilize leading open-source technologies including Spark, Airflow, Ray, MLFlow, TensorFlow, PyTorch, Docker, Kubernetes, and more.

Your Expertise:

• 5+ years of relevant industry experience (BS/Masters) or 2+ years with a PhD.
• Strong coding skills in Python, Java, or equivalent languages.
• Hands-on experience with distributed processing technologies (Spark, Kafka, Flink, Hadoop) and distributed storage (HDFS, S3).
• Solid knowledge of data warehousing concepts and databases (e.g. PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redshift, BigQuery, ClickHouse).
• Expertise building scalable ETL pipelines using schedulers like Airflow, Luigi, Oozie, or AWS Glue.
• Proven ability to analyze large datasets, identify insights, and drive impactful product solutions.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills; comfortable collaborating cross-functionally.
• Experience building end-to-end Machine Learning platforms and deploying ML models.
• Familiarity with Kubernetes, Docker, and modern infrastructure tools.
• Deep understanding of distributed systems and engineering best practices.

Your Location:

This position is US - Remote Eligible. The role may include occasional work at an Airbnb office or attendance at offsites, as agreed to with your manager. While the position is Remote Eligible, you must live in a state where Airbnb, Inc. has a registered entity. Click here for the up-to-date list of excluded states. This list is continuously evolving, so please check back with us if the state you live in is on the exclusion list. If your position is employed by another Airbnb entity, your recruiter will inform you what states you are eligible to work from.

Our Commitment To Inclusion & Belonging:

Airbnb is committed to working with the broadest talent pool possible. We believe diverse ideas foster innovation and engagement, and allow us to attract creatively-led people, and to develop the best products, services and solutions. All qualified individuals are encouraged to apply.

We strive to also provide a disability inclusive application and interview process. If you are a candidate with a disability and require reasonable accommodation in order to submit an application, please contact us at: [email protected]. Please include your full name, the role you’re applying for and the accommodation necessary to assist you with the recruiting process. 

We ask that you only reach out to us if you are a candidate whose disability prevents you from being able to complete our online application.