Senior Software Engineer, Integrated Knowledge Management

The Community You Will Join:

Providing world class customer service for our community of guests and hosts is a critical mission of Airbnb. This is an area of unprecedented scale and complexity. In no other domain does the efficiency and reliability of customer service technology translate directly into a competitive advantage, brand loyalty, and the bottom line of the business.

The Integrated Knowledge Management team, part of the Airbnb Community Support Platform, is foundational to creating the best customer service experience for our users. The Integrated Knowledge Management team is responsible for building robust and scalable platforms to enable Airbnb’s content and knowledge to be leveraged across users, both internal and external, and to also serve as the authoritative knowledge source for Conversational AI and LLM applications.

The Difference You Will Make:

As a Senior Software Engineer on the Integrated Knowledge Management team, you will be in charge of developing solutions to scale and optimize content & knowledge indexing, retrieval and ranking across all of Airbnb. You will be deeply involved in building highly available and scalable services in close collaboration with other engineering, ML/AI, product, content, data science and operations teams to meet the ever evolving needs of Airbnb’s Community Support Platform. There are many problems to solve in this domain including fine tuning content for ingestion by LLMs and optimizing knowledge retrieval to power contextual in-product support applications.

A Typical Day: 

• Lead the scoping, technical requirements, architecture, and the implementation of the new features and functionality.
• Analyze data, build hypotheses, experiment, learn and iterate to improve the Integrated Knowledge Management services.
• Collaborate with cross-functional working groups (frontend/backend/ML engineers, design, product and operation teams), in both North America and globally, to design and build end-to-end product solutions to improve Airbnb’s customer service experience.
• Mentor other engineers in developing their technical, operational, and collaboration skills.
• Advocate and participate in efforts to advance Airbnb’s engineering processes and technical foundations.

Your Expertise:

• 5+ years industry engineering experience
• BS, MS or PhD in CS or related field
• 2+ years of industry expertise in leveraging OpenSearch, Elasticsearch or similar technologies for content indexing, retrieval and ranking applications.
• [Bonus] Understanding of ML search and retrieval models.
• Proficiency in one or more backend JVM languages (Java/Kotlin/Scala etc).
• Proven expertise in building and maintaining high-performance, scalable and fault-tolerant backend systems powering consumer facing functionality.
• Industry experience building end-to-end Machine Learning products such as Chatbots, Voice Assistants, or similar AI-driven products is a plus.
• Comfortable navigating ambiguity and ownership of problem definitions.
• Ability to drive alignment, manage projects, and effectively collaborate with stakeholders.

Your Location:

This position is US - Remote Eligible. The role may include occasional work at an Airbnb office or attendance at offsites, as agreed to with your manager. While the position is Remote Eligible, you must live in a state where Airbnb, Inc. has a registered entity. Click here for the up-to-date list of excluded states. This list is continuously evolving, so please check back with us if the state you live in is on the exclusion list . If your position is employed by another Airbnb entity, your recruiter will inform you what states you are eligible to work from.

Our Commitment To Inclusion & Belonging:

Airbnb is committed to working with the broadest talent pool possible. We believe diverse ideas foster innovation and engagement, and allow us to attract creatively-led people, and to develop the best products, services and solutions. All qualified individuals are encouraged to apply.

We strive to also provide a disability inclusive application and interview process. If you are a candidate with a disability and require reasonable accommodation in order to submit an application, please contact us at: reasonableaccommodations@airbnb.com. Please include your full name, the role you’re applying for and the accommodation necessary to assist you with the recruiting process. 

We ask that you only reach out to us if you are a candidate whose disability prevents you from being able to complete our online application.