Staff Data Scientist – Relevance and Personalization 632 views

Airbnb has become a global platform that connects travelers and hosts from over 81,000 cities. Their mission is to enable a world where anyone can belong anywhere. Expanding their community to new types of hosts is critical to our mission.

The Relevance and Personalization team at Airbnb is responsible for search and personalization across the entire Airbnb digital platform. They are working on critical, impactful projects with a focus on the search ranking, recommendations, autocomplete, query understanding, and Airbnb’s ranking platform. They collaborate closely with teams across Airbnb to customize the guest search experience and support a healthy marketplace for hosts and guests to further Airbnb’s mission of creating a world where people can Belong Anywhere. Their team is headed by VP and Technical Fellow Ronny Kohavi, co-author of Trustworthy Online Controlled Experiments: A Practical Guide to A/B Testing.

They work on all parts of the ML stack from analyzing search usage to running controlled experiments, building models, writing data pipelines, and implementing updates to the online search service.

What You Will Do

• • Leverage Airbnb’s rich data set to enable better matches between guests and hosts
  • Interact with a global and cross-functional team (product manager, ML engineers, and other data scientists)
  • Provide insights/hypotheses and ideate new search and personalization features in Airbnb
  • Design controlled experiments to A/B test the features and perform deep analysis from the results to find actionable insights
  • Perform strategic analyses in order to ensure the long-term success of Airbnb’s marketplace of guests and hosts

They Are Looking For

• • 5+ years of industry experience and either a Ph.D. in Statistics (or equivalent) and strong engineering knowledge or MS in Computer Science (or equivalent) with strong statistical knowledge.
  • Prefer industry experience with relevance/ranking/recommendations or controlled experiments.
  • Proficient in R or Python, as well as query languages such as SQL, Hive, or Presto.
  • Experience working on production code using Java/Scala/Ruby.
  • Understanding of deep learning among other common families of models, feature engineering, feature selection, optimization algorithms
  • Proven ability to choose the right ML method to solve the problem within current constraints while having a clear vision of the next iterations and a good balance between exploration and exploitation of different techniques.

Recent blog posts about experimentation and papers from their team at Airbnb:

• • Selection Bias in Online Experimentation
  • Scaling Airbnb’s Experimentation Platform
  • Improving Deep Learning for Airbnb Search
  • Managing Diversity in Airbnb Search

Benefits

• • Stock
  • Competitive salaries
  • Quarterly employee travel coupon
  • Paid time off
  • Medical, dental, & vision insurance
  • Life insurance and disability benefits
  • Fitness Discounts
  • 401K
  • Flexible Spending Accounts
  • Apple equipment
  • Commuter Subsidies
  • Community Involvement (4 hours per month to give back to the community)
  • Company-sponsored tech talks and happy hours
  • Much more…

They are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at their company. They do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status