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…

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…

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…

Better Android Testing at Airbnb

Interaction Testing Part two of this series covered our screenshot testing approach. As our first integration tests, screenshots filled a gaping hole in our testing strategy and were immediately…

Using Chatbots to Provide Faster COVID-19 Community Support

From Data to Action With Airbnb Plus

A new “Plus” listing in Chicago offers a beautiful loft setting with a clean aesthetic Internships are some of the most powerful experiences a student can have during college. Very few opportunities allow you to learn and grow so much in 12 short weeks. On top of that, taking on an internship helps with making connections, improving teamwork, and learning how to navigate organizations. This…

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…

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…

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? …

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…

Better Android Testing at Airbnb

In part three of this series we saw how automated interaction testing can cover some of the code paths in our ViewModels by recording state changes. However…

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…

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 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…

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 Cross-Platform Mobile Team

This is the third in a series of blog posts in which we outline our experience with React Native and what is next for mobile at Airbnb. In addition to the countless technical pros and cons of React Native, we learned a ton about what React Native means for an…

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…

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…

How Airbnb Achieved Metric Consistency at Scale

Part-I: Introducing Minerva — Airbnb’s Metric Platform 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 At Airbnb, we lean on data to inform our critical decisions. We validate product ideas through randomized controlled experiments, and we track our business performance…

A Deep Dive into Airbnb’s Server-Driven UI System

By Ryan Brooks Background: Server-Driven UI Before we dive into Airbnb’s implementation of server-driven UI (SDUI), it’s important to understand the general idea of SDUI and how it provides an advantage over traditional client-driven…

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…

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…

Discovering and Classifying In-app Message Intent at Airbnb

Authors: Michelle Du, Shijing Yao Get embraced by plenty of natural light, brick, and plant in our new office in… Airbnb’s mission is to create a world where everyone can belong anywhere. Ensuring good communication between guests and hosts is one of the keys to developing a sense of belonging as well as a smooth and worry-free trip experience for guests. Millions of guests and…

Better Android Testing at Airbnb

In our first article we looked at the MvRx mocking system, and the Launcher that opens any screen or mock in the app. While…