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…

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…

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…

WIDeText: A Multimodal Deep Learning Framework

By Wayne Zhang, Mia Zhao, Yuanpei Cao Deep learning (DL) is helping us at Airbnb serve our stakeholders better…

React Native at Airbnb

Years later, it’s still possible to book a meeting in our Airstream This is the first in a series of blog posts in which we outline our experience with React Native and what is next for mobile at Airbnb. When Airbnb launched 10 years ago, smartphones were in their infancy. Since then, smartphones have become an essential tool to navigate our everyday…

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…

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…

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? …

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 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. …

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…

Growing Our Host Community with Online Marketing

By Tao Cui, Ye Wang and Bassel Namih Belonging is at the core of Airbnb’s mission. One essential step to make people feel like they can “belong anywhere” is to have homes where people can stay around the world. Airbnb is a community-driven super-brand, and acquiring hosts through the…

Avoiding Double Payments in a Distributed Payments System

Authors: Jon Chew and Ninad Khisti One of the conference rooms in our San Francisco office Background Airbnb has been migrating its infrastructure to a Service Oriented Architecture (“SOA”). SOA offers many upsides, such as enabling developer specialization and the ability to iterate faster. However, it also poses challenges for billing and payments applications because it makes it more difficult to…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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 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…

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…

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…

React Performance Fixes on Airbnb Listing Pages

Airbnb has some incredible listings in Cuba…and also a corner of the office inspired by Habana Vieja We have been hard at work migrating the airbnb.com core booking flow into a single-page server-rendered app using React Router and Hypernova. At the beginning of the year, we rolled this out for…

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…

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…

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…