Senior Data Scientist - Algorithm, Payments

The Community You Will Join:

The Payments organization at Airbnb seeks to become a global leader in trusted, transparent, and frictionless payment services to empower our diverse global community. As our platform grows, the payments team is building a scalable platform to support global scale, helping the company grow by bringing new markets and products to the platform, protecting our community & platform from fraud, and ensuring our platform experience is seamless for our guests and hosts.

About the position:

Our data science team is focused on enabling Airbnb’s mission by providing statistical insights and innovative data products that will drive improvements to our platform and empower our users around the world. As an algorithms data scientist in Payments, you will have the opportunity to collaborate with a strong team of engineers, product managers, designers and operational partners as you drive ideation, scoping, iteration, and execution of data-driven modeling/ML solutions. The challenges you will tackle range across a wide range of organizational opportunities, from amplifying our customers' payment experiences and bringing automated data intelligence to our systems to bolstering fraud detection capabilities and improving our platform’s quality.

A Typical Day: .

• Identify high impact business opportunities through data exploration and model prototyping, translate business problems into scientific formulations.
• Build, productionize, and operationalize machine learning models and pipelines at scale, develop data mastery to uncover learnings, and formulate structured frameworks to classify and interpret our users’ behavior.
• Utilize deep learning techniques for advanced feature engineering and model building, e.g., how to model for user behaviors sequences, or how can we detect anomalies effectively.
• Work cross-functionally with operations and product teams to define and collect labels for model training, optimize the effectiveness of manual review, and build self-satisfiable verifications that scale.
• Apply and experiment with state-of-the-art innovations to uplevel Airbnb status-quo approaches to technical problems
• Regularly present work internally at monthly meetings to technical, engineering and product stakeholders to iterate and generate excitement on roadmap progress.
• Publish externally and engage with the scientific community to advance Airbnb’s standing.

Your Expertise:

• Advanced degree in a quantitative field. PhD is a plus.
• 4+ years of relevant industry and/or academic experience developing scientific frameworks, building machine learning models, and implementing advanced experimentation techniques.
• Strong fluency in Python and familiarity with modern frameworks (e.g. Pytorch, Tensorflow) for hands-on IC work and advanced data analysis in SQL at scale.
• Deep understanding of Machine Learning best practices (eg. training/serving skew minimization, feature engineering, feature/model selection), algorithms (eg. gradient boosted trees, neural networks/deep learning, optimization) and domains (eg. natural language processing, computer vision, personalization and recommendation, anomaly detection).
• Comfortable collaborating with software engineers to understand complex systems and abstracted logs.
• Proven ability to create and drive technical and impactful roadmaps for the business, and lead seamless execution of it.
• Proven ability to communicate clearly and effectively to cross functional partners of varying technical levels.

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.