Airbnb Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer Security 

United States 

382485854

A Typical Day:

• Support, scale, and advance security or related functions through practical applied uses of data analytics, ML models, and integration of genAI and LLM models from past experience at equivalent size, scope, scale, and technically complex companies comparable to Airbnb.
• Provide strategic approaches and methodologies to advance security disciplines working with large scale structured and unstructured data, build, and continuously improve cutting edge Machine Learning models for these disciplines.
• Continuously identify, drive, and support opportunities where Information Security disciplines can benefit from your area of expertise. Work collaboratively with cross-functional partners including software engineers, product managers, operations, and data scientists to do so.
• Work through ambiguity to detailed solutions. You can and support others to take a vague problem, crisply frame the challenge, what’s being solved for, identify a path forward, and drive an initiative over the finish-line.
• You have a demonstrated ability to see the interconnectedness of not only the immediate problem you’re solving for, but also those of other organizations to unify cross-functional stakeholders to deliver solutions that are best for Airbnb vs. a single business unit.
• Self-motivated, proactive and proven ability to adapt well and work with teams having different operating cadences and breadth of subject matter backgrounds.
• Provide sound business judgment, a proven ability to influence others, strong analytical skills, and a track record of taking ownership, leading data driven analyses, and influencing results.
• Develop processes where little exists across large organizations, and demonstrated flexibility to get things done.
• Drive technology changes to improve capabilities to protect Airbnb in your area of expertise.

Your Expertise:

• 12+ years of industry experience in applied Machine Learning
• A Bachelor’s, Master’s, or PhD in CS/ML or related field
• Strong programming (Scala / Python / Java/ C++ or equivalent) and data engineering skills
• Deep understanding of Machine Learning best practices (eg. training/serving skew minimization, A/B test, 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)
• Experience with 3 or more of these technologies: Tensorflow, PyTorch, Kubernetes, Spark, Airflow (or equivalent), Kafka (or equivalent), data warehouse (eg. Hive)
• Industry experience building end-to-end Machine Learning infrastructure and/or building and productionizing Machine Learning models
• Exposure to architectural patterns of a large, high-scale software applications (e.g., well-designed APIs, high volume data pipelines, efficient algorithms, models)
• Experience with test driven development, familiar with A/B testing, incremental delivery and deployment.
• Experience with Information Security or similar domains.
• You have experience in developing and communicating effective and pragmatic strategies that you are directly responsible for and help engineering and business team(s) execute on. You don’t wait for things to happen to you, you make things happen. You feel personally responsible for the success of the initiative you are driving regardless of who is doing the work. You see beyond your immediate disciplines to tie together the needed end-to-end elements that will successfully sustain the capabilities you establish to achieve the unified objectives in support of the broader Information Security strategy at Airbnb.
• You have strong written and verbal communication skills. You can dive into the details with engineers and business partners while also speaking at the appropriate altitude when working with other organizations and leaders up to and including the executive level. You have empathy and seek to understand before being understood when communicating. This enables you to effectively identify the best path forward and influence how you approach a problem as well as how other teams may prioritize supporting the initiatives you are directly responsible for.