How We Enable Airbnb Team Members to Code Like a Mobile Engineer

Intro As part of the TechEd team, our team’s goal is to enable our technical talent through continuous learning programs. One of the most common programs we work on is new employee onboarding for Engineering and Data Science teams. However…

Server Rendering, Code Splitting, and Lazy Loading with React Router v4

Challenge accepted. Nicole, one of our hosts, taking some guests on a sunrise walk and picnic above… Some Background on Server Rendering at Airbnb Historically, Airbnb has been a Rails app. A few years back that started to change, we began using Rails simply as a data layer, and all render logic started migrating into JavaScript in…

Production Secret Management at Airbnb

Keys are handed off during a check-in in Shanghai Airbnb is a global community built on trust. The Security team helps to build trust by maintaining security standards to store, manage and access sensitive information assets. These include secrets, such as API keys and database credentials. Applications use secrets to provide everyday site features, and those secrets used to…

Our Journey Towards Cloud Efficiency

Introduction Airbnb was born in the cloud. In 2008, while many companies were operating data centers, a few clicks on the AWS console brought Airbnb to life. From our first Ruby on Rails app, to our more recent adoption of service-oriented architecture, the ability to…

Measuring Transactional Integrity in Airbnb’s Distributed Payment Ecosystem

By Ninad Khisti and William Betz In a distributed payment ecosystem, it is critical to accurately measure and track a transaction’s end to end state and contents to ensure consistency throughout the payment cycle. Without robust tracking, data leakage and errors can occur, resulting in either lost revenue or increased…

Building an Inclusive Codebase

By: Michael Bachand, Amanda Vawter, Dan Federman, Jake Silver, Julia Wang, Mark Tai Code is our craft. At Airbnb, we view our code and product as a reflection of our values. Each developer imbues their work with a piece of themselves. We want…

Building Services at Airbnb, Part 2

By Liang Guo and Frank Lin Vittoria is treating his guests to a tour of the Limoncello factory, where family makes… Airbnb is moving its infrastructure towards SOA. A reliable, performant, and developer-friendly service platform is essential in an architectural evolution. In a previous post, we shared a bird’s-eye view of what we have designed and built to scale the development of services and gave…

Airbnb’s Promotions and Communications Platform

By Paritosh Aggarwal and Henry Wu Introduction Airbnb is a busy marketplace with millions of active users across the globe. Billions of messages…

Improving Deep Learning for Ranking Stays at Airbnb

Search ranking is at the heart of Airbnb. Data from search logs* indicate it is a feature used by more than 90% of guests to book a place to stay. In ranking, we want the search results (referred to as listings) to be sorted…

Building Services at Airbnb Part 3

By: Weibo He, Liang Guo A bright and spacious Airbnb Plus listing in London Airbnb is moving its infrastructure towards a service-oriented architecture. A reliable, performant, and developer-friendly polyglot service platform is an underpinning component in Airbnb’s architectural evolution. In Part 1 and Part 2 of our Building Services series, we shared how we used Thrift service IDL-centered service…

Data Quality at Airbnb

Authors: Jonathan Parks, Vaughn Quoss, Paul Ellwood Introduction At Airbnb, we’ve always had a data-driven culture. We’ve assembled top-notch data science and engineering teams, built industry-leading data infrastructure, and launched numerous successful open source projects, including Apache Airflow and Apache Superset. Meanwhile, Airbnb has transitioned from a startup moving at light…

Experimentation & Measurement for Search Engine Optimization

Our San Francisco headquarters has it all, from comfy nooks to sunlit views. It’s the… For many of our potential guests, planning a trip starts at the search engine. At Airbnb, we want our product to be painless to find for past guests, and easy to discover for new ones. Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving our site — and more specifically…

Scaling Spark Streaming for Logging Event Ingestion

by Hao Wang and Liyin Tang Walking over a stream during an Airbnb Experience in Kuala Lumpur. Searching, viewing, and booking… Logging Event Ingestion at Airbnb Logging events are emitted from clients (such as mobile apps and web browser) and online services with key information and context about the actions or operations. Each event carries a specific piece of information. For example, when a guest searches for a beach house…

Better Android Testing at Airbnb

In our first article we looked at the MvRx mocking system, and the Launcher that opens any screen or mock in the app. While…

Learning Market Dynamics for Optimal Pricing

How do you think market dynamics influences this beautiful home in Cape Town? Market dynamics plays a key role in matching guests with hosts in two-sided marketplaces such as Airbnb. Supply and demand vary drastically across different locations, different check in dates and different lead times until check-in. It is important for us to understand and forecast these spatial and temporal trends in…

Amenity Detection and Beyond — New Frontiers of Computer Vision at Airbnb

Authors: Shijing Yao, Dapeng Li, Shawn Chen What amenities are there in this image? Can an algorithm detect them all? How can we train the algorithm effectively? If you are interested in the answers, please read on! Introduction In 2018, we published a blog post titled Categorizing Listing Photos at Airbnb…

Achieving Insights and Savings with Cost Data

by Anna Matlin and Tamar Eterman Introduction Business profitability and sustainability are powerful reasons to invest in infrastructure efficiency, but it is easy to feel lost about how to actually reduce costs. A foundation of robust and actionable data is essential for a successful efficiency program. At Airbnb, building this foundation…

Introducing MvRx: Android on Autopilot

Havana Vieja, a great place to hang out at Airbnb HQ when you want to… At Airbnb, we are moving at a faster pace than ever. Each year, more and more people are using Airbnb to travel. This year alone, we have already launched Airbnb Plus and we have countless other projects underway that we can’t wait to share. On the Android side of things…

Inside Connect: Supporting Apprentices as an Engineering Leader

As an engineering leader with 15+ years of industry experience, I am currently head of engineering for the Marketing Technology Platform at Airbnb. Our goal is to build world-class technology systems and tools that power the unique blend of performance and brand marketing strategies at Airbnb. In this post, I’d…

Taming Service-Oriented Architecture Using A Data-Oriented Service Mesh

By: Raymie Stata, Arun Vijayvergiya, Adam Miskiewicz At Hasura’s Enterprise GraphQL Conf on October 22, we presented Viaduct, what we’re calling a data-oriented service mesh that we believe will bring a step function improvement in the modularity of our microservices-based Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). In…

New Data Scientists: Tips for Success

You’re a new data scientist - congrats! If you are a junior data scientist in your first data role, you should be asking yourself, ‘How can I effectively execute?’ This…

Dynein: Building a Distributed Delayed Job Queueing System

An Airbnb Plus listing in Argyll, Scotland Introduction Asynchronous background jobs can often dramatically improve the scalability of web applications by moving time-consuming, resource-intensive tasks to the background. These tasks are often prone to failures, and retrying mechanisms often make it even more expensive…

How Airbnb Achieved Metric Consistency at Scale

Part-I: Introducing Minerva — Airbnb’s Metric Platform By: Amit Pahwa, Cristian Figueroa, Donghan Zhang, Haim Grosman, John Bodley, Jonathan Parks, Maggie Zhu, Philip Weiss, Robert Chang, Shao Xie, Sylvia Tomiyama, Xiaohui Sun Introduction At Airbnb, we lean on data to inform our critical decisions. We validate product ideas through randomized controlled experiments, and we track our business performance…

What’s Next for Mobile at Airbnb

This is the fifth in a series of blog posts in which we outline our experience with React Native and what is next for mobile at Airbnb. Exciting Times Ahead Even while experimenting with React Native, we continued to accelerate our efforts on native as well. Today, we have a number of exciting…

Applying Deep Learning To Airbnb Search

Searching for homes is the primary mechanism guests use to find the place they want to book. As the core of how the Airbnb marketplace functions, the goal of search ranking is to find guests the best possible options while rewarding the most deserving hosts. Ranking at Airbnb is a…