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…

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…

Better Android Testing at Airbnb

In the previous article we detailed our test framework implementation. This was a high level look at the approach we take to running our tests…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Better Android Testing at Airbnb

A seven part series on Android Test Frameworks we’ve built at Airbnb — this first part looks at our philosophy on testing, and the mocking system that lays the foundation for all our tests. Automated testing for Android development has historically been challenging at Airbnb, due to both technical and…

Himeji: A Scalable Centralized System for Authorization at Airbnb

The Problem Over the last couple of years, Airbnb engineering moved from a monolithic Ruby on Rails architecture to a service oriented architecture. In our Rails architecture, we had an API per resource to access the underlying data. These APIs had authorization…

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? …

From Data to Action With Airbnb Plus

A new “Plus” listing in Chicago offers a beautiful loft setting with a clean aesthetic Internships are some of the most powerful experiences a student can have during college. Very few opportunities allow you to learn and grow so much in 12 short weeks. On top of that, taking on an internship helps with making connections, improving teamwork, and learning how to navigate organizations. This…

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…

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…

Better Android Testing at Airbnb

In previous installments of this series we laid out our state mocking system, and how we built UI integration testing on top of it. In…

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…

Fighting Financial Fraud with Targeted Friction

The piano in our “Vienna” meeting room in San Francisco has an easter egg. Move… On any given night, nearly two million people are staying in Airbnb listings in 191 countries around the world. The rapid growth of our global community is predicated on one thing: trust. We take a comprehensive approach to trust, which consists of both robust proactive measures and reactive support, but…

The Smart Instant Book Filter

By Yi Hou, Li Fan & Tao Cui People like it when things are fast. We want our deliveries within an hour, our downloads within a minute, and our news in an instant. That is why we need to help our Airbnb community to book listings they want instantly. Instant…

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…

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…

Building an Effective Test Pipeline in a Service Oriented World

This staircase connects several floors of our beautiful new San Francisco office, 650 Townsend. Context Over the past 2 years, Airbnb engineering has been working on a major initiative to migrate from a gigantic Rails Application to a decoupled service-oriented architecture, or SOA…

Inside Connect: An Apprentice Perspective

Connect 2020 Apprentices at Airbnb HQ Hi, I’m Ale. I was a Connect 2020 Apprentice and I’m going to write a bit about my experience with the program, especially for those who are interested in applying. To learn more about the goals and structure of the Connect program, take a look at Part 1 of this…

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…

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…

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…

Categorizing Listing Photos at Airbnb

Authors: Shijing Yao, Qiang Zhu, Phillippe Siclait Walking into our new office in San Francisco, meeting rooms evoke the variety of our… Airbnb is a marketplace featuring millions of homes. Travelers around the world search on the platform and discover the best homes for their trips. Aside from location and price, listing photos are one of the most critical factors for decision-making during a guest’s…