Staff Software Engineer, Communication Products

Airbnb is a global hospitality company that has grown significantly since its inception in 2007. The Communication Products team is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to lead the technical vision for machine learning-powered messaging features, focusing on the integration of intelligent capabilities to enhance user interactions between guests and hosts.

Responsibilities:

• Define and drive the technical strategy for integrating ML capabilities into Airbnb's messaging products, including smart replies, message classification, content moderation, translation, and conversational assistance
• Own the full lifecycle of ML-powered features: from prototyping and experimentation through launch, monitoring, and iteration
• Design, build, and operate the systems that serve ML models within the messaging stack, with a focus on latency, reliability, and scalability
• Write and review technical designs that solve large, open-ended problems at the intersection of ML and product engineering without clearly-known solutions
• Partner with ML, data science, and product teams to identify high-value opportunities, establish evaluation criteria, and close the gap between offline model performance and production impact
• Collaborate with other engineers and cross-functional partners across Messaging, Trust & Safety, Localization, and Platform organizations to align on long-term technical solutions
• Mentor, guide, advocate, and support the career growth of individual contributors
• Establish engineering standards for ML integration across the messaging surface, including feature flagging, A/B testing, observability, and graceful degradation

Requirements:

• 9+ years of relevant engineering hands-on work experience
• Bachelors, Masters, or PhD in CS or related field
• Demonstrated experience building and shipping ML-powered product features in production environments, including model serving, feature pipelines, online/offline evaluation, and monitoring
• Exceptional architecture abilities and experience with architectural patterns of large, high-scale applications
• Familiarity with NLP/NLU techniques and large language models, particularly as applied to messaging, conversational AI, or content understanding
• Shipped several large-scale projects with multiple dependencies across teams, specifically at the intersection of ML infrastructure and product engineering
• Technical leadership and strong communication skills with the ability to translate between ML research, product goals, and engineering execution
• Experience operating distributed, real-time systems at scale with high reliability requirements
• Experience with real-time messaging systems or event-driven architectures
• Familiarity with ML infrastructure at scale (e.g., feature stores, model registries, online inference platforms)
• Prior work on trust & safety, content moderation, or internationalization in a messaging context
• Experience with LLM-based product features, including prompt engineering, retrieval-augmented generation, or fine-tuning