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…

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…

Using Chatbots to Provide Faster COVID-19 Community Support

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…

Project Lighthouse — Part 2: Measurement with anonymized data

Introduction In June, the Airbnb…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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 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…

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…

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…

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…

Introducing AloeStackView for iOS

Some of the ~200 screens in the Airbnb iOS app built using AloeStackView. At Airbnb, we’re always looking for ways to improve the efficiency of building products. Over the past few years, our mobile development efforts have increased at a dramatic rate. In the past year alone, we’ve added more than 260 screens to our iOS app. At the same time, more and…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…