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…

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…

Airbnb Engineering in Seattle

Want to know what it’s like to work in Airbnb’s new office? Ari Steinberg, Director of Engineering and Head of the Airbnb Seattle office, shares more on Airbnb’s Seattle presence. Why is Airbnb in Seattle? We wanted to expand our footprint outside of San Francisco to attract some of the…

React Native at Airbnb: The Technology

This is the second in a series of blog posts in which we outline our experience with React Native and what is next for mobile at Airbnb. React Native itself is a relatively new and fast-moving platform in the cross-section of Android, iOS, web, and cross-platform frameworks. After two years…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Beyond “How May I Help you? “

By Xin (Cindy) Chen, Mengting Wan The Airbnb office in Dublin offers plenty of workspace beyond your desk. At Airbnb, we serve a global community of hosts and guests. An essential part of Airbnb’s business is to provide high quality customer service at scale. Live chat is one of our customer support channels, where customers can chat with our customer service agents…

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…

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…

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 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…

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…

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…

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…

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 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…

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…

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…

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…

The Airbnb Talent Directory

The past few months have been hard for all of us, but it has been inspiring to see everyone, especially the Airbnb community, support each other during an unprecedented time. Our CEO, Brian Chesky, recently announced the departure of nearly 1,900 employees. Among these employees are incredibly talented Engineers and Data Scientists who have contributed to Airbnb in uncountable ways. To support our teammates departing Airbnb, we launched the Alumni Talent Directory, an opt-in directory which lists valued employees and contingent workers who have recently departed Airbnb. If you’re currently hiring or looking for incredible talent, the Talent Directory is full of amazing Engineers and Data Scientists, among others. We hope we can connect these individuals with new opportunities. It’s been an honor to work with such a talented team committed to our mission of belonging, and we’re confident any company would be lucky to have them. We’d also like to thank the cross-functional team that created the site in an extremely short period of time. We are all grateful for their hard work: Chris Arrington, Gina Groom, Noor Malik, Derek Southard, Parag Hardas, Robin Foyle, Mike Fowler, Christian Williams, Megan Gebhart, Alex Cheng, Steve Rafferty, Sonia Yang, Andy Tran, Angela Wu, Linsey Jackson, James Deslonde, Kelly Coldwell, as well as Joe Gebbia for inspiring the idea. Airbnb Alumni Talent Directory

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…

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…