Airbnb
Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Traffic Intelligence
$212K–$265K
United States · Staff · Full-time · Posted Aug 13, 2026
- Experience
- 9+ years of applied production ML experience.
- Education
- MS/PhD in a quantitative field (e.g., Statistics, ML) or equivalent deep engineering experience.
About the job
Architects and operates real-time machine-learning systems that classify web and API traffic, distinguish legitimate automation from abusive actors, and support traffic mitigation.
What you'll do
- Own traffic-scoring models from problem framing through real-time deployment, managing adversarial feedback and reducing bot-incident MTTM.
- Build offline-to-online data pipelines and rigorous evaluation frameworks for reliable, measurable model performance.
- Optimize inference for millisecond edge latency and integrate scoring into automated mitigation workflows across regions.
What they ask for
- 9+ years of applied production ML experience in non-stationary, adversarial domains such as traffic integrity, bot mitigation, or fraud.
- Experience architecting scalable offline-to-online data pipelines for certified source-of-truth datasets and low-latency inference.
- Strong model evaluation skills, including ROC/AUC, precision/recall, and calibration; experience with warehouse-scale SQL and high-volume event-stream feature engineering.
- Practical knowledge of internet edge infrastructure, plus cross-functional technical leadership and mentoring experience.
Nice to have
- PhD in Statistics, Mathematics, Machine Learning, or a related quantitative discipline.
- Expertise in graph-based or Sybil detection, causal/econometric methods, Bayesian calibration, certified-data governance, or LLM agent tooling and benchmarking.
Pay
$212,000 — $265,000 USD (base salary)
Tools
SQL, ROC/AUC, CDN, HTTP/TLS
AI focus
Builds traffic-classification ML to distinguish legitimate AI assistants and other automated agents from abusive actors; preferred exposure includes LLM agent tooling and benchmarking.
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