Senior Data Scientist, Platform (Algorithms/Trust)

The Community You Will Join:

“Our real innovation is not allowing people to book a home; it’s designing a framework to allow millions of people to trust one another. Trust is the real energy source that drives Airbnb…” 

- Brian Chesky, Airbnb Co-Founder & CEO (2019)

Trust is the foundation of a vibrant Airbnb community. The Content Integrity Data Science team helps build and protect that trust by ensuring that the content on Airbnb, including listings, profiles, messages and other user-generated experiences, is accurate, authentic and aligned with our policies and community standards.

We partner closely with product, engineering, policy and operations teams to develop advanced AI-driven content understanding systems, scale effective human-in-the-loop workflows and proactively defend against emerging content risks, so guests and hosts can interact with confidence.

The Difference You Will Make: 

This role is unique in that it directly improves the safety, trust, and quality of real-world user experiences by advancing Airbnb’s ability to understand, interpret and act on content at scale. You will help shape how the platform reasons about listings, profiles, messages and other user-generated content by building the next generation of Trust Content Understanding Models.

The ideal candidate is a motivated and talented “full-stack” Data Scientist with strong applied ML intuition and a bias toward impact, who can own and drive forward challenging, high-visibility initiatives such as:

• Advance Airbnb’s content integrity capabilities by building Natural Language Processing (NLP) and LLM-based models that understand intent, policy compliance, quality and risk across listings, profiles, and user communications
• Develop high-performing models for detecting problematic or misleading content, including text classification, semantic similarity, information extraction and generative model-based reasoning for policy interpretation and enforcement
• Design and optimize human-in-the-loop Machine Learning (ML) systems for content review, labeling, escalation and continuous model improvement
• Build systems to detect emerging content risks and abuse patterns across regions, cohorts and surfaces using statistical, ML and representation-learning approaches
• Design intelligent sampling and evaluation strategies to measure rare events, policy recall, false positives/negatives and model blind spots in large-scale content systems

A Typical Day: 

• Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning: Build and deploy production AI/ML systems for content integrity and trust content understanding, including feature engineering, model development and evaluation, thresholding, error analysis and end-to-end model lifecycle management. This includes working with NLP and LLM-based models in real production settings.
• Inference: Partner with inference data scientists to conduct rigorous quantitative analyses, applying working knowledge of causal inference to interpret results, assess impact, and identify gaps and opportunities to improve content quality and trust outcomes.
• Optimization: Develop frameworks to analyze tradeoffs between enforcement accuracy, user experience, operational cost and coverage, and propose strategies to optimize overall system effectiveness.
• Communication & Collaboration: Deliver robust research reports with effective data visualizations, clear storytelling and bullet-proof accuracy to drive forward impact in collaboration with cross-functional partners in product, engineering and operations
• Empowerment: Think strategically about how to scale and evolve Airbnb’s content integrity defenses, helping define the long-term vision for the role of AI-driven content understanding across the Trust ecosystem.

Your Expertise: 

• 5+ years of industry experience in a quantitative analysis role with a Master’s degree in a quantitative field (computer science, statistics etc.), or 2+ years of experience with a Ph.D.
• State-of-the-art knowledge of AI/ML models 
• Hands-on experience building, evaluating, and deploying NLP and LLM-based solutions, including text classification, information extraction, semantic understanding or generative applications.
• Working knowledge of causal inference
• Skilled in statistical programming (Python or R) and database usage (SQL)
• Proven ability to communicate clearly and effectively to audiences of varying technical levels
• Ability to translate complex findings and results into compelling narratives that drive impact
• Excellent project management, communication, and collaboration skills
• Trust & Safety experience is a plus

Your Location:

This position is US - Remote Eligible. The role may include occasional work at an Airbnb office or attendance at offsites, as agreed to with your manager. While the position is Remote Eligible, you must live in a state where Airbnb, Inc. has a registered entity. Click here for the up-to-date list of excluded states. This list is continuously evolving, so please check back with us if the state you live in is on the exclusion list. If your position is employed by another Airbnb entity, your recruiter will inform you what states you are eligible to work from.

Our Commitment To Inclusion & Belonging:

Airbnb is committed to working with the broadest talent pool possible. We believe diverse ideas foster innovation and engagement, and allow us to attract creatively-led people, and to develop the best products, services and solutions. All qualified individuals are encouraged to apply.

We strive to also provide a disability inclusive application and interview process. If you are a candidate with a disability and require reasonable accommodation in order to submit an application, please contact us at: reasonableaccommodations@airbnb.com. Please include your full name, the role you’re applying for and the accommodation necessary to assist you with the recruiting process. 

We ask that you only reach out to us if you are a candidate whose disability prevents you from being able to complete our online application.