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…

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…

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

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Contextual Calendar Reminders

By Tao Cui and Yuting Gu Airbnb’s mission is to create a world where anyone can belong anywhere. So when hosts forget to update their calendars and are booked by guests on dates that don’t work, the host has to cancel the reservation. This definitely does not make the guests…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Airbnb’s Promotions and Communications Platform

By Paritosh Aggarwal and Henry Wu Introduction Airbnb is a busy marketplace with millions of active users across the globe. Billions of messages…

How We Enable Airbnb Team Members to Code Like a Mobile Engineer

Intro As part of the TechEd team, our team’s goal is to enable our technical talent through continuous learning programs. One of the most common programs we work on is new employee onboarding for Engineering and Data Science teams. However…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Server Rendering, Code Splitting, and Lazy Loading with React Router v4

Challenge accepted. Nicole, one of our hosts, taking some guests on a sunrise walk and picnic above… Some Background on Server Rendering at Airbnb Historically, Airbnb has been a Rails app. A few years back that started to change, we began using Rails simply as a data layer, and all render logic started migrating into JavaScript in…

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…

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…

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…

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…