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…

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…

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…

How Druid enables analytics at Airbnb

By Pala Muthiah and Jinyang Li Wikipedia: A druid was a member of the high-ranking professional class in ancient Celtic cultures… Airbnb serves millions of guests and hosts in our community. Every second, their activities on Airbnb.com, such as searching, booking, and messaging, generate a huge amount of data we anonymize and use to improve the community’s experience on our platform. The Data Platform Team…

Introducing visx from Airbnb

by Chris Williams & Harrison Shoff After 3 years of development, 2.5 years of production use at Airbnb, and a rewrite in TypeScript we are excited to announce the official 1.0 release of visx (formerly vx). You can find the project on GitHub and browse documentation and examples on airbnb.io. …

Continuing Our Support of Lottie Open Source Community

After years of working with open source contributors to create new features, fix bugs, and maintain the issue…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Contextualizing Airbnb by Building Knowledge Graph

By Xiaoya Wei and Yizheng Liao A riverfront, all-bamboo house on Airbnb in Bali. Imagine you are planning a trip to Los Angeles. The first step is to visit Airbnb.com and search for “Los Angeles.” On the backend, the query “Los Angeles” is translated into a block on the map; available Homes within this block are returned 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…

ts-migrate: A Tool for Migrating to TypeScript at Scale

TypeScript is the official language of frontend web development at Airbnb. Yet, the process of adopting TypeScript and migrating a mature codebase containing thousands of JavaScript files didn’t happen in one day. TypeScript adoption went through the process of an initial proposal, adoption by multiple teams, a beta phase 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…

Listing Embeddings in Search Ranking

By Mihajlo Grbovic, Haibin Cheng, Qing Zhang, Lynn Yang, Phillippe Siclait and Matt Jones Airbnb’s marketplace contains millions of diverse listings which potential guests explore through search results generated from a sophisticated Machine Learning model that uses more than hundred signals to decide how to rank a particular listing…

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…

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…

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…