Drimva

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.

Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative

First seen Oct 10, 2026 · Last verified Nov 5, 2026 (UTC)