Creative engineers and data scientists building Airbnb.
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UnlockHow we addressed the cold start problem for Airbnb’s natural language search by jointly generating synthetic training data — queries and relevance labels — from de identified booking and search signals. By : Wendy Ran Wei , Hao Li , Weiwei Guo , Xiaowei Liu , Xueyin Chen , Chun How Tan , Malay Haldar , Soumyadip…
How we capture real production database traffic at Airbnb and replay it offline to load test, plan capacity, and de risk upgrades. By: Zuofei Wang , Erluo Li Introduction At Airbnb, MySQL compatible databases are a critical backbone of our online database infrastructure: a fleet of hundreds of clusters supporting…
How Airbnb uses proximity signals to personalize without relying on individual user history. By : Wei Jiang , Bin Xu , Bharathi Thangamani , Weiwei Guo , Sundar Srinivasavaradhan , Tracy Yu , Huiji Gao , Swapnil Ghike , Michael Kinoti Great personalization starts with knowing your user. But what happens when the user…
How two new Chronon capabilities, Push Mode and NRT Model Transform, allows us to provide more relevant search results instantly as a guest explores, rather than waiting for the next batch run. By : Pengyu Hou , Yuli Han , Daochen Zha , Haozhen Ding , Xin Liu , Sophie Wang , Pallavi Adusumilli , Sherry Li , Henry…
How Airbnb’s agent harness transforms unstructured data exploration by encoding scientific methodology into scalable, reproducible, and audit ready infrastructure. By : Wren Dougherty Ask a coding agent to analyze 100,000 customer support conversations and within minutes you’ll have a polished taxonomy, precise…
Project Lighthouse — Part 3: Introducing project lighthouse anonymize The data in Project Lighthouse is powered by privacy preserving anonymization code. We’ve put this code into open source, and published two new technical papers detailing the scalable algorithms and data quality frameworks behind it. By: Adam…
When we retrain, when we rebuild, and when we leave a model alone. By: Harrison Katz A forecast that carries weight The Forecasting Data Science team at Airbnb produces many of the forecasts the rest of the company plans around: demand, bookings, cancellations, and a range of finer cuts by market and segment,…
Rebuilding login and signup surfaced product insights, not just technical challenges. Here’s how we designed Flexible Authentication at the intersection of product intuition and technical architecture. By : Jose Santos , Mike Barry For Airbnb, logins at irregular intervals are normal. A guest books a trip in January…
How Airbnb teams build trustworthy Generative AI products by treating evaluation as a first class engineering discipline; not an afterthought. Nestled into the lush hillside, this stunning modern retreat features striking natural wood architecture, terraced balconies, and a serene landscape. By: Rohit Girme , Dan…
How we built a Transformer based sequence model that encodes years of guest behavior to surface the right listings at the right time. By: Daochen Zha , Chun How Tan , Xin Liu , Bin Xu , Han Zhao , Xiaowei Liu , Jun Shi , Tracy Yu , Hui Gao , Huiji Gao , Liwei He , Michael Kinoti , Stephanie Moyerman , and Sanjeev…
