Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Growth Platform Engineering

About the Role

The Growth Platform team’s vision is to drive long-term sustainable growth for the Airbnb community. Our mission is to build a best-in-class agentic system and capabilities to support the growth of all Airbnb products. We deliver highly personalized and relevant content and product experiences on and off the Airbnb platform, progressing toward full autonomy (AI assisted → agentic → autonomous).

As a Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer, you will develop AI-powered solutions shaping the future of Airbnb's agentic growth platform. You will guide engineers in brainstorming, designing, and developing AI products and features from inception to production.

Example Projects

• AI-Powered Content Generation: Develop agentic capabilities to autonomously create personalized emails, push notifications, ad copy, and creatives.
• ML/AI Orchestration for Decisioning: Use AI to determine optimal audience, message, channel, and timing for communications.
• Proactive Marketing Analyst Agent: Design an autonomous AI agent to identify marketing opportunities and convert them into executable campaigns using closed-loop performance feedback.

Responsibilities

• Work with large-scale structured and unstructured data to explore, experiment, build, and continuously improve ML models and pipelines.
• Collaborate with cross-functional partners (product managers, operations, data scientists) to identify business opportunities and prioritize requirements.
• Hands-on develop, productionize, and operate ML/AI models and pipelines at scale for batch and real-time use cases.
• Leverage third-party and in-house ML tools and infrastructure for low-latency serving, fast iteration, and model upkeep.
• Guide and mentor engineers across the company in applying ML/AI to their solutions.

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications

• 12+ years of industry experience in applied ML/AI (inclusive of MS or PhD in relevant fields).
• Strong programming (Scala, Python, Java, C++, or equivalent) and data engineering skills.
• Deep understanding of ML/AI best practices (e.g., training/serving skew minimization, A/B testing, feature engineering, model selection) and algorithms (gradient boosted trees, neural networks/deep learning, optimization).
• Domain knowledge in areas such as natural language processing, computer vision, personalization, search and recommendation, marketplace optimization, or anomaly detection.
• Experience with technologies such as TensorFlow, PyTorch, Kubernetes, Apache Airflow, and Apache Kafka (or equivalents).
• Expertise in architectural patterns for large-scale software applications and high-volume data pipelines.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience automating processes and building agentic solutions/frameworks.
• Experience leading the full AI product development lifecycle using agile practices.
• Experience building testing frameworks for agent behavior validation and continuous improvement, and driving architectural requirements on ML infrastructure.

Location & Eligibility

• US - Remote Eligible (requires residing in a state where Airbnb, Inc. has a registered entity).
• May include occasional travel to an Airbnb office or offsites.