Manager, Machine Learning Engineering - Relevance and Personalization

The Community You Will Join:

Join Airbnb’s Relevance and Personalization team, where you’ll have a unique opportunity to shape the discovery experience for over 150M global users! As a Machine Learning Engineering Manager on the team, you’ll lead a group of ML engineers and set direction for projects that power search and recommendations across the entire Airbnb platform—directly influencing how guests and hosts connect in meaningful ways. Come lead the design and deployment of state-of-the-art ranking algorithms and build resilient, high-performing teams and systems that optimize Airbnb’s most important business goals.

The Difference You Will Make:

Our team pushes the boundaries of AI and machine learning throughout the search ranking stack, from data pipelines to feature engineering, model innovation, real-time serving, and large-scale experimentation. In this role, you’ll amplify impact through technical leadership—setting strategy, raising engineering quality, and ensuring the team delivers reliable results at scale. You’ll still stay close to the work—guiding architecture and critical technical decisions—while enabling engineers to do their best work.

Collaboration lies at the heart of our culture. You’ll partner with talented engineers, data scientists, product managers, and designers from across Airbnb to develop holistic solutions that ensure a vibrant and equitable marketplace. You’ll also be accountable for team health: hiring, coaching, performance management, and building an inclusive culture. Together, we’re dedicated to advancing Airbnb’s mission to create a world where anyone can belong anywhere.

Some past publications from the team can be found here: https://sites.google.com/view/airbnb-relevance-publications/home

A Typical Day: 

• Work with large scale structured and unstructured data, provide technical leadership to build and continuously improve cutting edge Machine Learning (ML) models for Airbnb product, business and operational use cases.
• Work collaboratively with cross-functional partners including software engineers, product managers, operations and data scientists, set team priorities and roadmap, identify opportunities for business impact, understand, refine, and prioritize requirements for machine learning models, drive engineering decisions, and quantify impact.
• Lead the delivery of ML/AI models and pipelines at scale, including both batch and real-time use cases, ensuring operational excellence (on-call health, reliability, cost, latency, and model quality).
• Leverage third-party and in-house ML/AI tools & infrastructure to develop reusable, highly differentiating and high-performing Machine Learning systems, enable fast model development, low-latency serving and ease of model quality upkeep, and drive adoption of best practices across the team.
• Example projects include: feature platform, model interpretability, hyperparameter optimization, concept drift detection.
• Hire, coach, and develop engineers; set clear expectations; conduct performance management; and build a strong, inclusive team culture.

Your Expertise:

• 10+ years of industry experience in applied ML/AI, inclusive MS or PhD in relevant fields.
• 3+ years of engineering management experience, with 8+ years of relevant software development industry experience in a fast paced tech environment.
• Strong programming (Scala / Python / Java / C++ or equivalent) and data engineering skills, with demonstrated ability to guide design reviews and architecture decisions for ML systems.
• Deep understanding of ML/AI best practices (e.g. training/serving skew minimization, A/B test, feature engineering, feature/model selection), algorithms (e.g. neural networks/deep learning, optimization) and domains (e.g. natural language processing, computer vision, personalization, search and recommendation, marketplace optimization, anomaly detection) with the ability to translate technical tradeoffs into product and business outcomes.
• Experience with 3 or more of these technologies: Tensorflow, PyTorch, Kubernetes, Spark, Airflow (or equivalent), Kafka (or equivalent), data warehouse (e.g. Hive)
• Industry experience building end-to-end ML/AI infrastructure and/or building and productionizing ML models, including leading multi-quarter initiatives and coordinating delivery across teams.
• Exposure to architectural patterns of large, high-scale software applications (e.g., well-designed APIs, high volume data pipelines, efficient algorithms, models) and experience establishing engineering standards (reviews, testing, observability, incident response).
• Experience with test driven development, familiar with A/B testing, incremental delivery and deployment, and ability to create team processes that improve execution predictability and quality.

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.