Better Android Testing at Airbnb

Interaction Testing Part two of this series covered our screenshot testing approach. As our first integration tests, screenshots filled a gaping hole in our testing strategy and were immediately…

Better Android Testing at Airbnb

In part three of this series we saw how automated interaction testing can cover some of the code paths in our ViewModels by recording state changes. However…

Scaling a Mature Data Pipeline — Managing Overhead

Author: Zachary Ennenga The view from the third floor at Airbnb HQ! Background There is often a natural evolution in the tooling, organization, and technical underpinning of data pipelines. Most data teams and data pipelines are born from a monolithic collection of queries. As the pipeline grows in its complexity, it becomes sensible to leverage the Java or Python Spark…

Operationalizing Node.js for Server Side Rendering

At Airbnb, we have spent years steadily migrating all Frontend code to a consistent architecture where entire web pages are written as a hierarchy of React components hydrated with data from our API. The role Ruby on Rails plays in getting the web to the browser is reduced every day…

Project Lighthouse — Part 1: P-sensitive k-anonymity

Introduction In June, the Airbnb Anti-Discrimination product team announced Project Lighthouse, an initiative with the goal…

The Airbnb Talent Directory

The past few months have been hard for all of us, but it has been inspiring to see everyone, especially the Airbnb community, support each other during an unprecedented time. Our CEO, Brian Chesky, recently announced the departure of nearly 1,900 employees. Among these employees are incredibly talented Engineers and Data Scientists who have contributed to Airbnb in uncountable ways. To support our teammates departing Airbnb, we launched the Alumni Talent Directory, an opt-in directory which lists valued employees and contingent workers who have recently departed Airbnb. If you’re currently hiring or looking for incredible talent, the Talent Directory is full of amazing Engineers and Data Scientists, among others. We hope we can connect these individuals with new opportunities. It’s been an honor to work with such a talented team committed to our mission of belonging, and we’re confident any company would be lucky to have them. We’d also like to thank the cross-functional team that created the site in an extremely short period of time. We are all grateful for their hard work: Chris Arrington, Gina Groom, Noor Malik, Derek Southard, Parag Hardas, Robin Foyle, Mike Fowler, Christian Williams, Megan Gebhart, Alex Cheng, Steve Rafferty, Sonia Yang, Andy Tran, Angela Wu, Linsey Jackson, James Deslonde, Kelly Coldwell, as well as Joe Gebbia for inspiring the idea. Airbnb Alumni Talent Directory

Discovering and Classifying In-app Message Intent at Airbnb

Authors: Michelle Du, Shijing Yao Get embraced by plenty of natural light, brick, and plant in our new office in… Airbnb’s mission is to create a world where everyone can belong anywhere. Ensuring good communication between guests and hosts is one of the keys to developing a sense of belonging as well as a smooth and worry-free trip experience for guests. Millions of guests and…

Machine Learning-Powered Search Ranking of Airbnb Experiences

By: Mihajlo Grbovic, Eric Wu, Pai Liu, Chun How Tan, Liang Wu, Bo Yu, Alex Tian Airbnb Experiences are handcrafted activities designed and led by expert hosts that offer a unique taste of local scene and culture. Each experience is vetted for quality by a team of editors before it…

Empowering Data Science with Engineering Education

Authors: Michelle Du, Yu Guo, Jeff Feng Our brand new kitchen on the 2nd floor of 888 Brannan St. Since launching Data University (Data U) at Airbnb two years ago, our data education program has made significant progress towards our overarching vision of empowering every employee to make data-informed decisions. To date, over 400 courses have been taught to thousands of course…

Airbnb Engineering and Data Science at KDD 2018

The 2018 KDD conference is right around the corner — and we are looking forward to seeing you there. (That’s Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, if you’re not familiar with it!) We are excited to have three Airbnb papers accepted for oral presentation at the Applied Data Science Track and…

Scaling Knowledge Access and Retrieval at Airbnb

Cherry blossoms in full bloom in Tokyo Imagine you’re finally getting to take that vacation you’ve dreamed of — three countries, seven cities, thousands of miles. It’s everything you could want and more, right? But where do you start? How do you know what to eat, where to visit, how to experience what makes your destination truly…

How Airbnb is Boosting Data Literacy With ‘Data U Intensive’ Training

Since we introduced Airbnb’s Data University, the program has continued to thrive and evolve. One improvement has been the addition of team-specific trainings with content tailored to the work of that team. In this post, we describe the impact of this addition and the lessons learned in its implementation. What is Data University? …

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…

Supercharging Apache Superset

By: Erik Ritter, Grace Guo, Jesse Yang, John Bodley, and Zuzana Vejrazkova Introduction At Airbnb, many employees rely on data every day to do their jobs. While several different tools are used for analysis, at the core of Airbnb’s self-serve business intelligence (BI) solution is Apache Superset™ (“Superset”). Superset is…

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…

How does Airbnb track and measure growth marketing?

Introduction Airbnb’s mission is to “Create a world where anyone can belong anywhere.” This message is delivered to people all around the world through marketing, e.g., See What’s Possible When It’s Made Possible by Hosts. It helps Airbnb connect guests and hosts…

Project Lighthouse — Part 2: Measurement with anonymized data

Introduction In June, the Airbnb…

Introducing AloeStackView for iOS

Some of the ~200 screens in the Airbnb iOS app built using AloeStackView. At Airbnb, we’re always looking for ways to improve the efficiency of building products. Over the past few years, our mobile development efforts have increased at a dramatic rate. In the past year alone, we’ve added more than 260 screens to our iOS app. At the same time, more and…

Beyond “How May I Help you? “

By Xin (Cindy) Chen, Mengting Wan The Airbnb office in Dublin offers plenty of workspace beyond your desk. At Airbnb, we serve a global community of hosts and guests. An essential part of Airbnb’s business is to provide high quality customer service at scale. Live chat is one of our customer support channels, where customers can chat with our customer service agents…

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…

Inside Connect: Airbnb’s Engineering Apprenticeship Program

by Beti Gathegi & Jacqui Watts Hello! We’re excited that you’re here to learn more about the Connect program. Before we share details, though, we’d like to introduce ourselves. We’re Beti Gathegi and Jacqui Watts — a team of two whose purpose at Airbnb is to help bring this program…

A Deep Dive into Airbnb’s Server-Driven UI System

By Ryan Brooks Background: Server-Driven UI Before we dive into Airbnb’s implementation of server-driven UI (SDUI), it’s important to understand the general idea of SDUI and how it provides an advantage over traditional client-driven…

Interning at Airbnb with a disability

A picture of two people’s hands as one gives a key attached to a keychain… My name is Hilary Sun, and I’m a master’s student at Stanford University finishing my M.S in Computer Science. I worked as an engineering intern for the past twelve weeks on the Trust - Financial Fraud team, which keeps Airbnb’s business safe and secure by minimizing fraudulent financial losses while…

Better Android Testing at Airbnb

In previous articles we’ve looked at Airbnb’s product architecture, the mocking system we built for it, and how this ecosystem…

Detecting Vulnerabilities With Vulnture

Introduction Securing assets and data is a challenging and important task, regardless of your industry or company size. On Airbnb’s InfoSec team, we are constantly thinking about how to quickly and effectively detect and remediate…