Principal Machine Learning Engineer, Generative AI, CS AI

Role Overview

Airbnb was born in 2007 when two hosts welcomed three guests to their San Francisco home. It has since grown to over 5 million hosts who have welcomed over 2 billion guest arrivals across the globe. Hosts offer unique stays and experiences that enable guests to connect with communities in a more authentic way.

Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence are central to the Airbnb product, impacting areas from Trust to Payments, and Customer Service to Marketing, ensuring optimal experiences for guests and hosts.

The CS AI product team drives Customer Support x Artificial Intelligence (CSxAI) initiatives by adopting Generative AI technologies to create an intelligent, scalable, and exceptional service experience. The team develops and enhances AI models, ML services, and tools including LLM fine-tuning, alignment and optimization, RAG/Search, LLM evaluation and testing automation, feedback-based learning, and guardrails 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 while optimizing models for high-performance deployment on Airbnb’s ML Infrastructure. You will collaborate with product managers, software engineers, data scientists, and operations teams to brainstorm, design, and develop AI products such as AI Assistant, Autonomous agents, recommendation systems, travel planning, and many more products that significantly impact 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 at 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 a 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.

Your Location

This position is US - Remote Eligible. The role may include occasional work at an Airbnb office or attendance at offsites, as agreed with your manager. While the position is Remote Eligible, you must live in a state where Airbnb, Inc. has a registered entity.