Airbnb - San Francisco, CA

Why is Search Important at Airbnb?

Airbnb is revolutionizing the way the world travels and Search is the engine of the Airbnb marketplace. We drive the core of the business by matching an incredible amount of demand to a large, diverse supply of listings. Our mission is to make sure every traveler that lands on Airbnb finds their perfect listing.

The matching problem at Airbnb has many unique and exciting challenges - guests with all levels of intent, extremely diverse supply of over a million listings, long gaps between search and booking, and hosts that can decline reservations.

Airbnb search serves millions of requests per day, and our team owns everything from infrastructure, to ranking, to user experience. We are a diverse team with a wide variety of skills and expertise. We love learning from each other, having fun, and constantly improving.

We are looking for engineers across a wide variety of areas - Frontend, Infrastructure, Ranking and Relevance. Some problems we will be tackling in 2015.

Ranking

• Scoring of search results with advanced Machine Learning models having millions of ranking features. Making such advanced models practical while coping with the growth of Airbnb inventory across the world.
• Personalizing the search experience for every Airbnb guest and host.

Experience

• Helping users decide where to travel to and orienting them in an unfamiliar city.
• Helping them whittle down and evaluate from thousands of options.
• Keep track of their progress and easily resume their search.

Infrastructure

• Building the store for understanding and storing locations and associated metadata.
• Aggregate and serve information for in-session personalization for every Airbnb user.
• Scaling the search service to support the growth in the number of listings.

The following experience is relevant to us (not all will apply):

• Real-world expertise with Information Retrieval, Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Recommendation Systems
• Experience working with large, custom search systems.
• Strong Java experience
• Experience with Hive/Cascading/Spark
• Lucene expertise
• Rigor in A/B testing, automated testing, and other engineering best practices
• Exposure to architectural patterns of large, high-scale web applications
• Ruby on Rails
• Strong CS fundamentals

Benefits

• Competitive salaries
• Stock
• $2,000 yearly employee travel coupon
• Paid time off
• Medical, dental, & vision insurance
• Life insurance and disability benefits
• 401K
• Flexible Spending Accounts
• Apple equipment
• Company sponsored tech talks and happy hours
• Breakfast, lunch, and dinner
• Much more...