Staff Software Engineer, Experimentation Data

Airbnb was born in 2007 when two Hosts welcomed three guests to their San Francisco home, and has since grown to over 4 million Hosts who have welcomed more than 1 billion guest arrivals in almost every country across the globe. Every day, Hosts offer unique stays and experiences that make it possible for guests to connect with communities in a more authentic way.

The Community you will join:

The Experimentation team’s mission is to provide an insightful, reliable and easy to use experimentation platform (i.e. A/B testing) for our customers across the company. Experimentation is critical to decision-making and customer understanding at Airbnb, with thousands of experiments being run each year on our platform. Our team is very multidisciplinary, owning a vertical stack including UIs for setting up and analyzing experiments, data pipelines and libraries for calculating results, and clients for assignment and delivery.

The difference you will make:

As a member of this team you would be working with talented engineers on building infrastructure to solve cutting edge experimentation problems. The primary focus of this position will be on our platform’s results computation stack, consisting of data pipelines, a grammar for experimentation, and an analysis engine. You will bring a deep understanding of data processing, API design and experimentation methodology to help us reliably and accurately calculate results at scale, and to push the boundaries of what we can learn from experiments.  The stack you would be working with consists of technologies like Spark, Trino, Python, and Airflow.

A typical day:

• Work to build, maintain, optimize and extend complex and large scale data processing pipelines.
• Contribute to Airbnb’s library for flexible and extensible on-demand analysis of experiments.
• Partner with teams across the organization to improve the impact of experimentation across the company. Participate in all phases of software development of the overall platform from architecture/design through implementation, testing, and on-call.
• Work closely with Data Science partners to implement sophisticated statistical methodologies into the platform.

• Participate in experiment reviews to understand how our customers use our infrastructure, identify areas for improvement and learn about features rolling out across the company.

Your expertise:

• 9+ years in a hands-on software engineering role, shipping high quality code to production, especially for high scale, distributed systems, data pipelines, and/or analytical libraries.
• Experience with at least one modern, general programming language (e.g. Python, Java)
• Experience with scientific/statistical computation, especially involving online experimentation
• Experience building software with ergonomic interfaces and great developer experience, especially for technical data users (e.g. data scientists).
• Experience with at least one modern “big data” technology (e.g. Spark, Dataflow)
• Strong SQL skills - you should be able to “go deep” when debugging or optimizing.
• [Nice to have] Experience building frameworks which generate data pipelines at scale.
• [Nice to have] Experience with a distributed stream processing framework (e.g. Flink, Kafka, Dataflow)

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: [email protected]. 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.