Staff Data Scientist, Algorithms, Operations Research/Customer Support

The Community You Will Join:

Airbnb is a mission-driven company dedicated to helping create a world where anyone can belong anywhere. Customer Support (CS) aims to build the world’s most loyal travel community through exceptional service. Improving the operational efficiency of our CS offerings will allow us to meet our customers when and how they need us most.

As a Staff Data Scientist working on Algorithms in CS, you will have the opportunity to collaborate with a strong team of engineers, product managers, designers and operation agents to build scalable and robust systems to match our services to specific customer needs.  You will be able to create meaningful impact through deep scientific understanding and by designing interventions for Airbnb CS’s most critical challenges.

The Difference You Will Make:

For this role, we’re seeking an Operations Research expert join the Customer Support Data Science team, and have a direct opportunity to contribute, influence, and lead in the CS Personalization space by designing scalable scientific solutions for problems like: 

• Creating models to identifying segments of users with unique CS needs and develop matching algorithms to pair those users to the right CS path
• Determine allocation strategy of Make Goods budget to maximize business impact
• Estimating the long term impact of changing the CS experience for those groups of users
• Providing strategic insights around tradeoffs between CS quality and cost to empower us to offer the best possible CS experience to our customers
• Optimizing CS routing engines with new algorithms and simulations to validate them
• Building a deep understanding of our individual agent’s abilities in order to improve CS quality

A Typical Day: 

• Lead DS efforts building segmentation features for CS including data exploration, optimization and model prototyping
• Work collaboratively with cross functional partners including software engineers, product managers, operations and research, to refine requirements for segmentation models, drive scientific decisions, and quantify impact
• Develop simulations to validate the impact of potential product and operational changes to the business
• Design and utilize new experiment frameworks to measure the effectiveness feature launches, even when A/B tests are infeasible 
• Regularly present work internally at monthly meetings to technical, engineering and product stakeholders to iterate and generate excitement on roadmap progress
• Bring new ideas to the team which can improve the operational efficiency of customer support at airbnb.

Your Expertise:

• 9+ years of relevant industry experience (e.g. data scientist, tech lead, junior faculty) and a Master’s degree or PhD in relevant fields
• Strong fluency in Python, SQL, and statistical programming such as R
• Familiarity with causal inference and experimentation and a desire to continue to learn
• Proven ability to communicate clearly and effectively to audiences of varying technical levels
• Proven mix of strong intellectual curiosity with high level of pragmatism and engagement with the technical community. 

Preferred Expertise:

• Experience in operational research such as queuing theory or resource allocation models
• Experience in developing simulations of complex systems

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.