Airbnb is hiring a Staff Software Engineer, Communication Products

Airbnb is seeking a Staff Software Engineer for Communication Products to lead the technical vision for ML-powered messaging features. You will architect and deliver intelligent capabilities end-to-end, partnering deeply with ML and product teams to build a first-class messaging experience and raise the engineering bar.

What You'll Do

• 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.
• Help drive key technical deliverables for the larger Communications organization.

What We're Looking For

• 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.
• 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.
• Shipped several large-scale projects with multiple dependencies across teams, specifically at the intersection of ML infrastructure and product engineering.

Nice to Have

• Familiarity with NLP/NLU techniques and large language models, particularly as applied to messaging, conversational AI, or content understanding.
• 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.

Team & Environment

You will be part of the Communication Products team, collaborating with ML, data science, product, Messaging, Trust & Safety, Localization, and Platform organizations.

Benefits & Compensation

• Bonus eligibility.
• Equity eligibility.
• Employee Travel Credits.
• Compensation range: $204,000—$255,000 USD.

Work Mode

This is a remote position open to candidates in the USA.

Airbnb is committed to working with the broadest talent pool possible. We believe diverse ideas foster innovation and engagement. Airbnb is proud to be an Equal Employment Opportunity employer.