Principal Machine Learning Engineer, CS AI

Role Overview

Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence are at the heart of the Airbnb product, impacting areas from Trust to Payments, Customer Service, and Marketing to enhance guest and host experiences. The CS AI product team is dedicated to driving Customer Support x Artificial Intelligence (CSxAI) initiatives by adopting Generative AI technologies to enable an intelligent, scalable, and exceptional service experience. This involves developing and enhancing various AI models, ML services, and tools, including LLM fine-tuning, alignment and optimization, RAG/Search, LLM evaluation and testing automation, feedback-based learning, and guardrail for a wide range of applications within Airbnb.

The Difference You Will Make

As a Principal Machine Learning Engineer, you will be responsible for fine-tuning state-of-the-art LLMs for diverse use cases and optimizing models for high-performance deployment on Airbnb’s ML Infrastructure. You will collaborate with product managers, software engineers, data scientists, and operation teams to brainstorm, design, and develop AI products such as AI Assistant, Autonomous agents, recommendation systems, and travel planning tools that will make significant impacts in the world of travel.

A Typical Day

• Work with large-scale structured and unstructured data; explore, experiment, build, and continuously improve foundation models for Airbnb product, business, and operational use cases.
• Create a multi-year tech roadmap that enables the team to stay on the leading edge of the rapidly evolving AI landscape and leverage best-in-class technologies to deliver customer benefits.
• Continuously evaluate recent and upcoming large foundational models, ensuring the selection and refinement of the highest quality models for enhanced performance and efficiency.
• Hands-on prototype, develop, and productionize LLM models and pipelines at scale, including both batch and real-time use cases.
• Drive key AI architectural decisions for products and contribute to Airbnb’s ML platform architecture and strategy.

Your Expertise

• PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Mathematics, Statistics, or related technical field.
• 10+ years of experience with developing machine learning models and products at scale from inception to business impact.
• Programming experience in Python and hands-on experience with frameworks such as PyTorch.
• Proven record of training, fine-tuning, optimizing models, and inference run-time.
• Post-training experience in areas like data processing for fine-tuning; responsible LLMs; LLM alignment; reinforcement learning; efficient training and inference; language model evaluation; and/or multilingual and multimodal modeling.
• Or specialized experience in runtime optimizations, model quantization, compression, on-device inference, GPU inference, pytorch, kernel development.