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…

Introducing Epoxy for iOS

Epoxy’s story on iOS began in 2016. Swift was still a very new language, and we had recently started to broadly adopt it across our codebase. With the new language, we were still experimenting with how to best build UI. …

How Airbnb Standardized Metric Computation at Scale

Part II: The six design principles of Minerva compute infrastructure 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 As described in the first post of this series, Airbnb invested significantly in building Minerva, a single source of truth metric platform that standardizes the…

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…

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…

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…

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. …

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…

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…

What’s Next for Mobile at Airbnb

This is the fifth in a series of blog posts in which we outline our experience with React Native and what is next for mobile at Airbnb. Exciting Times Ahead Even while experimenting with React Native, we continued to accelerate our efforts on native as well. Today, we have a number of exciting…

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…

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…

Applying Deep Learning To Airbnb Search

Searching for homes is the primary mechanism guests use to find the place they want to book. As the core of how the Airbnb marketplace functions, the goal of search ranking is to find guests the best possible options while rewarding the most deserving hosts. Ranking at Airbnb is a…

Introducing Showkase: A Library to Organize, Discover, and Visualize Your Jetpack Compose Elements

Over the last few years, Android™ development has gone through significant changes in how apps are structured, the language used for development, the tooling & libraries that speed up our development, and the improvements in testing apps. What didn’t change in all these years is the Android UI toolkit. This…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Zooming Towards Human Connection

By: Fatemeh Alavizadeh, Mojtaba Mehrara Meet the dogs of Chernobyl on this Online Experience hosted by Lucas Introduction Creating human connection is the core of Airbnb’s mission. We launched Airbnb Experiences to encourage travelers to connect with locals and with each other through one-of-a-kind experiences that highlight the uniqueness of their destinations. We’ve since grown it to a community of hosts leading more…

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? …

Inside Connect: Supporting Apprentices as an Engineering Leader

As an engineering leader with 15+ years of industry experience, I am currently head of engineering for the Marketing Technology Platform at Airbnb. Our goal is to build world-class technology systems and tools that power the unique blend of performance and brand marketing strategies at Airbnb. In this post, I’d…

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…

Designing Experimentation Guardrails

by Tatiana Xifara, Reid Andersen & Ali Rauh Each week, thousands of online experiments run concurrently on the Airbnb platform to measure the impact of potential product changes…

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…

Supporting Dynamic Type at Airbnb

By Noah Martin & Hugo Ahlberg Background Since iOS 7, Dynamic Type has allowed users to choose a prefered font size for their phone. At Airbnb, we try to build an app that our entire community can use — since Dynamic Type is a critical accessibility feature, we knew supporting it…