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…

Visualizing Data Timeliness at Airbnb

Imagine you are a business leader ready to start your day, but you wake up to find that your daily business report is empty — the data is late, so now you are blind. Over the last year, multiple teams…

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 1

By Liang Guo, Frank Lin, and Junjie Guan Alexis, one of our hosts, shows some of her guests how to shuck oysters in… Airbnb is moving its infrastructure at an accelerated pace towards a SOA (service-oriented architecture), but moving from a monolithic Rails service towards a SOA while building out new products and features is not without its challenges. In this post, we share what…

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…

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…

How Airbnb is Moving 10x Faster at Scale with GraphQL and Apollo

I had the opportunity to kick off GraphQL Summit last month with a talk that involved quite a bit of live coding (the Keynote intro ends at minute 6:00 if you’re in a hurry!). Check it out: From the feedback I gathered over the following days of the conference…

Contextual Calendar Reminders

By Tao Cui and Yuting Gu Airbnb’s mission is to create a world where anyone can belong anywhere. So when hosts forget to update their calendars and are booked by guests on dates that don’t work, the host has to cancel the reservation. This definitely does not make the guests…

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…

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…

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…

Capturing Data Evolution in a Service-Oriented Architecture

The dining hall in the San Francisco Office is always gleaming with natural sunlight! Labor day weekend is just around the corner! Karim is amped for a well deserved vacation. He logs in to Airbnb to start planning a trip to San Francisco, and stumbles upon a great listing hosted by Dany. He books it. A moment later, Dany receives a notification that his…

Building a faster web experience with the postTask scheduler

When was the last time you opened a page on a website and tried to click on something multiple times for it to work? Or the last time you swiped on an image in a carousel and it stuttered and shifted around unnaturally? While this type of experience happens far…

Building Services at Airbnb, Part 4

By Junjie Guan, Rui Dai and Xing An Intro In Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 of our Building Services at Airbnb series, we shared how…

On Spark, Hive, and Small Files: An In-Depth Look at Spark Partitioning Strategies

Author: Zachary Ennenga Airbnb’s new office building, 650 Townsend Background At Airbnb, our offline data processing ecosystem contains many mission-critical, time-sensitive jobs — it is essential for us to maximize the stability and efficiency of our data pipeline infrastructure. So, when a few months back, we encountered a recurring issue that caused significant outages of our data…

A “Krispr” Approach to Kubernetes Infrastructure

Introduction Airbnb is built on a service-oriented architecture (SOA). In our production infrastructure, we run hundreds of services that do everything from calculating pricing to returning search results to sending messages to users. To unify and scale our infrastructure, we use Kubernetes, an open source container orchestration engine, to define and…

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…

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…

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…

Introducing Deploy Pipelines to Airbnb

The deployment pipeline is used for services that power these unique Experiences on Airbnb.com. At Airbnb, downtime is not just an inconvenience — there is often substantial real-world impact on our users. As a constant reminder of this incredibly important fact, we created a prominently placed poster of a single tweet from many moons ago. Roughly paraphrased, it reads: @AirbnbHelp Help! I’m locked outside…

Reconciling GraphQL and Thrift at Airbnb

The.WAV hosting AFROHAUS Brunch in Los Angeles a few months ago Backend Engineer: Hmm. So you’re saying this “GraphQL” will allow any web or native engineer to arbitrarily query basically any field in any backend service, recursively, however they want, without any backend engineers involved? Frontend Engineer: Yeah, right? It’s amazing! […silence…] Backend Engineer: Guards, seize this person. For several years…

Data Quality at Airbnb

Authors: Vaughn Quoss, Jonathan Parks, 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…

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…

Our Swift Style Guide Is Now Open Source

Some of Airbnb’s native engineers talking in our Native Product Development tech talk last August A brief history of Swift at Airbnb At WWDC 2014, Apple surprised us with a new language: Swift. At Airbnb, we quickly jumped in head first and wrote our first line of…

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…