Creative engineers and data scientists building a world where you can belong anywhere. http://airbnb.io - Medium
Rebuilding login and signup surfaced product insights, not just technical challenges. Here’s how we designed Flexible Authentication at the intersection of product intuition and technical architecture. By : Jose Santos , Mike Barry For Airbnb, logins at irregular intervals are normal. A guest books a trip in January and may not open the app again until summer. A host checks back only when a…
How Airbnb teams build trustworthy Generative AI products by treating evaluation as a first-class engineering discipline; not an afterthought. Nestled into the lush hillside, this stunning modern retreat features striking natural wood architecture, terraced balconies, and a serene landscape. By: Rohit Girme , Dan Miller , Mia Zhao , Lifan Yang , Clint Kelly Introduction Generative AI breaks a lot…
How we built a Transformer-based sequence model that encodes years of guest behavior to surface the right listings at the right time. By: Daochen Zha , Chun How Tan , Xin Liu , Bin Xu , Han Zhao , Xiaowei Liu , Jun Shi , Tracy Yu , Hui Gao , Huiji Gao , Liwei He , Michael Kinoti , Stephanie Moyerman , and Sanjeev Katariya Introduction Planning a trip on Airbnb rarely happens in a single session. A…
Training an LLM is the easy part. The hard part is designing experiments and evaluations that you can trust enough to know whether the new model is actually an improvement. By : Baharak Saberidokht Introduction Shipping a production LLM system means iterating fast on improvements to something that is, by construction, non-deterministic. Models drift, judges disagree with themselves, references…
How Airbnb’s data engineers and analytics engineers built a consistent and flexible data modeling framework to support the expansion into Homes, Experiences, and Services. By : Patrick Lam , Namrata Lamba , Jamie Stober With the May 2025 Summer Release, Airbnb redesigned its app, relaunched Experiences, and debuted Services, pushing us beyond our traditional Homes focus. For the data teams, this…
How Airbnb built a Kubernetes sidecar to deliver dynamic configuration reliably at scale. By : Bo Teng , Cosmo Qiu , Siyuan Zhou , Ankur Soni , Xin Huang , Willis Harvey Introduction In our previous post , we explored Airbnb’s dynamic configuration system, Sitar, with a focus on service architecture and configuration change safety. Now for the harder question: once a config change is committed,…
How Airbnb used sequential geographic recovery signals and prior propagation to generate reliable corridor-level forecasts when local data was scarce. By: Harrison Katz The problem with unprecedented shocks Almost every forecasting system is built on the same implicit assumption: the future will resemble the past. You train on historical data, you validate on holdout periods, and you trust that…
How Airbnb shifts from PaaS to an internal knowledge graph infrastructure at scale. By: Lucen Zhao , Shukun Yang , Ashish Jain Knowledge graphs offer a natural and powerful way to represent relationships between entities. Many real-world systems are fundamentally about connections. Airbnb’s identity graph captures relationships between users in a graph database. The identity graph serves…
Moving from an internal tool to a community-driven, production-ready data mesh. By : Ryan Tanner , Raymie Stata , Adam Miskiewicz Introduction We’re excited to announce the 1.0 release of the Viaduct. This release marks a shift from Viaduct being an Airbnb-internal tool that happens to be open source to a true community-driven project with a stable public API. The 1.0 release includes substantial…
Designing monitoring that works when everything else doesn’t. By : Abdurrahman J. Allawala Introduction When an incident hits, teams lean on observability to answer the only questions that matter: what’s broken, and why? Monitoring systems are designed to help you answer these questions, and they usually do. But what happens when your observability stack is dependent on the same systems that are…