Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Security

Airbnb was born in 2007 when two Hosts welcomed three guests to their San Francisco home, and has since grown to over 4 million Hosts who have welcomed more than 1 billion guest arrivals in almost every country across the globe. Every day, Hosts offer unique stays and experiences that make it possible for guests to connect with communities in a more authentic way.

The Community You Will Join:

At Airbnb, we want to build a world where anyone can belong anywhere – and the first step in that direction is creating a community that’s open, inclusive, and built on trust. In a world where our digital presence and identity is as important as our physical presence, we believe that a fundamental part of earning this trust is by ensuring that we protect our users, the data they entrust to us, and our infrastructure. At Airbnb, our Information Security practices, and resulting trust, are part of the reason users choose to use and continue using our products.

The Information Security team plays a critical role in maintaining and building our community’s trust in our platform that enables millions of users to explore the world and belong anywhere. As a critical horizontal function within Airbnb, Information Security spans the scope of the company and organizations that make it up to secure Airbnb giving anyone who joins the team the ability to see all aspects of the business.

The Difference You Will Make:

We are looking for a Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer to contribute to advancing Information Security protections and related operations across a variety of domains such as Identity and Access Management, Insider Risk, and device protections through the use of data analytics, machine learning, and related emerging tech such as genAI and LLMs. You will partner across the Information Security team along with cross-functional engineering and business organizations to achieve the strategic priorities that secure Airbnb for your area of focus.

A Typical Day:

• Support, scale, and advance security or related functions through practical applied uses of data analytics, ML models, and integration of genAI and LLM models from past experience at equivalent size, scope, scale, and technically complex companies comparable to Airbnb.
• Provide strategic approaches and methodologies to advance security disciplines working with large scale structured and unstructured data, build, and continuously improve cutting edge Machine Learning models for these disciplines.
• Continuously identify, drive, and support opportunities where Information Security disciplines can benefit from your area of expertise. Work collaboratively with cross-functional partners including software engineers, product managers, operations, and data scientists to do so.
• Work through ambiguity to detailed solutions. You can and support others to take a vague problem, crisply frame the challenge, what’s being solved for, identify a path forward, and drive an initiative over the finish-line.
• You have a demonstrated ability to see the interconnectedness of not only the immediate problem you’re solving for, but also those of other organizations to unify cross-functional stakeholders to deliver solutions that are best for Airbnb vs. a single business unit.
• Self-motivated, proactive and proven ability to adapt well and work with teams having different operating cadences and breadth of subject matter backgrounds.
• Provide sound business judgment, a proven ability to influence others, strong analytical skills, and a track record of taking ownership, leading data driven analyses, and influencing results.
• Develop processes where little exists across large organizations, and demonstrated flexibility to get things done.
• Drive technology changes to improve capabilities to protect Airbnb in your area of expertise.

Your Expertise:

• 12+ years of industry experience in applied Machine Learning
• A Bachelor’s, Master’s, or PhD in CS/ML or related field
• Strong programming (Scala / Python / Java/ C++ or equivalent) and data engineering skills
• Deep understanding of Machine Learning best practices (eg. training/serving skew minimization, A/B test, feature engineering, feature/model selection), algorithms (eg. gradient boosted trees, neural networks/deep learning, optimization) and domains (eg. natural language processing, computer vision, personalization and recommendation, anomaly detection)
• Experience with 3 or more of these technologies: Tensorflow, PyTorch, Kubernetes, Spark, Airflow (or equivalent), Kafka (or equivalent), data warehouse (eg. Hive)
• Industry experience building end-to-end Machine Learning infrastructure and/or building and productionizing Machine Learning models
• Exposure to architectural patterns of a large, high-scale software applications (e.g., well-designed APIs, high volume data pipelines, efficient algorithms, models)
• Experience with test driven development, familiar with A/B testing, incremental delivery and deployment.
• Experience with Information Security or similar domains.
• You have experience in developing and communicating effective and pragmatic strategies that you are directly responsible for and help engineering and business team(s) execute on. You don’t wait for things to happen to you, you make things happen. You feel personally responsible for the success of the initiative you are driving regardless of who is doing the work. You see beyond your immediate disciplines to tie together the needed end-to-end elements that will successfully sustain the capabilities you establish to achieve the unified objectives in support of the broader Information Security strategy at Airbnb.
• You have strong written and verbal communication skills. You can dive into the details with engineers and business partners while also speaking at the appropriate altitude when working with other organizations and leaders up to and including the executive level. You have empathy and seek to understand before being understood when communicating. This enables you to effectively identify the best path forward and influence how you approach a problem as well as how other teams may prioritize supporting the initiatives you are directly responsible for.

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.

How We'll Take Care of You:

Our job titles may span more than one career level. The actual base pay is dependent upon many factors, such as: training, transferable skills, work experience, business needs and market demands. The base pay range is subject to change and may be modified in the future. This role may also be eligible for bonus, equity, benefits, and Employee Travel Credits.

Pay Range$244,000—$304,000 USD