Airbnb
Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Query Intelligence
$200K–$235K
United States · Senior · Full-time · Posted Jul 14, 2026
- Experience
- 5+ years of industry experience in applied Machine Learning, inclusive of MS or PhD in relevant fields.
- Education
- MS or PhD in relevant fields; included in the stated 5+ years of industry experience.
About the job
Build and operate machine-learning systems that interpret guest search queries and power personalized search and recommendation experiences across Airbnb.
What you'll do
- Develop query-understanding capabilities such as autocomplete, query tagging and expansion, and intent modeling.
- Build, productionize, and operate machine-learning models and pipelines for batch and real-time use cases.
- Partner with cross-functional teams to prioritize opportunities, make engineering decisions, and measure business impact.
What they ask for
- Strong programming and data-engineering skills in Scala, Python, Java, C++, or equivalent.
- Deep understanding of machine-learning practices, algorithms, and domains including NLP, personalization, search and recommendation, or marketplace optimization.
- Experience building end-to-end machine-learning models and applying large language models and modern NLP.
- Experience with 3 or more listed technologies: Tensorflow, PyTorch, Kubernetes, Spark, Airflow (or equivalent), Kafka (or equivalent), data warehouse (e.g. Hive).
Nice to have
- Familiarity with natural-language, AI-native, and agentic search experiences.
- Exposure to architecture patterns for large-scale software applications.
Pay
$200,000 — $235,000 USD (base salary)
Tools
Scala, Python, Java, C++, Tensorflow, PyTorch, Kubernetes, Spark
AI focus
Develop query-understanding models and natural-language search experiences using modern NLP and LLMs, including intent classification, sequence tagging, text generation, and query/location expansion.
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