Senior Data Scientist, Platform – Algorithms/Trust

Role Overview

• This role is unique in that it directly improves the safety, trust, and quality of real-world user experiences by advancing Airbnb’s ability to understand, interpret and act on content at scale.
• You will help shape how the platform reasons about listings, profiles, messages and other user-generated content by building the next generation of Trust Content Understanding Models.
• Advance Airbnb’s content integrity capabilities by building Natural Language Processing (NLP) and LLM-based models that understand intent, policy compliance, quality and risk across listings, profiles, and user communications.
• Develop high-performing models for detecting problematic or misleading content, including text classification, semantic similarity, information extraction and generative model-based reasoning for policy interpretation and enforcement.
• Design and optimize human-in-the-loop Machine Learning (ML) systems for content review, labeling, escalation and continuous model improvement.
• Build systems to detect emerging content risks and abuse patterns across regions, cohorts and surfaces using statistical, ML and representation-learning approaches.
• Design intelligent sampling and evaluation strategies to measure rare events, policy recall, false positives/negatives and model blind spots in large-scale content systems.
• Build and deploy production AI/ML systems for content integrity and trust content understanding, including feature engineering, model development and evaluation, thresholding, error analysis and end-to-end model lifecycle management.
• Partner with inference data scientists to conduct rigorous quantitative analyses, applying working knowledge of causal inference to interpret results, assess impact, and identify gaps and opportunities to improve content quality and trust outcomes.
• Develop frameworks to analyze tradeoffs between enforcement accuracy, user experience, operational cost and coverage, and propose strategies to optimize overall system effectiveness.
• Deliver robust research reports with effective data visualizations, clear storytelling and bullet-proof accuracy to drive forward impact in collaboration with cross-functional partners in product, engineering and operations.
• Think strategically about how to scale and evolve Airbnb’s content integrity defenses, helping define the long-term vision for the role of AI-driven content understanding across the Trust ecosystem.

Requirements

• 5+ years of industry experience in a quantitative analysis role with a Master’s degree in a quantitative field (computer science, statistics etc.), or 2+ years of experience with a Ph.D.
• State-of-the-art knowledge of AI/ML models
• Hands-on experience building, evaluating, and deploying NLP and LLM-based solutions, including text classification, information extraction, semantic understanding or generative applications.
• Working knowledge of causal inference
• Skilled in statistical programming (Python or R) and database usage (SQL)
• Proven ability to communicate clearly and effectively to audiences of varying technical levels
• Ability to translate complex findings and results into compelling narratives that drive impact
• Excellent project management, communication, and collaboration skills
• Trust & Safety experience is a plus

Tech Stack

• Python
• SQL

Benefits

• This role may also be eligible for bonus, equity, benefits, and Employee Travel Credits.