Senior Data Scientist, Guest Travel Insurance (Algorithms) Job at Airbnb

Job Description

Airbnb was born in 2007 when two hosts welcomed three guests to their San Francisco home, and has since grown to over 5 million hosts who have welcomed over 2 billion guest arrivals in almost every country across the globe. Every day, hosts offer unique stays and experiences that make it possible for guests to connect with communities in a more authentic way. The Community You Will Join: Airbnb is a mission-driven company dedicated to helping create a world where anyone can belong anywhere. Travel should feel safe—and AirCover is how we deliver on that promise. Through Guest Travel Insurance (GTI), we offer guests peace of mind at the moment of booking and throughout their trip. As a Data Scientist on AirCover, you’ll work at the intersection of insurance, personalization, and machine learning—building intelligent systems that help the right guest discover the right coverage at the right moment. You’ll join a tight-knit, high-output DS team that runs one of Airbnb’s most experiment-dense personalization roadmaps, partnering daily with product, engineering, operations, and legal to ship work that directly affects guest trust and revenue. The Difference You Will Make: We’re looking for a machine learning expert who is excited to own hard problems end-to-end—from prototype to production.

Job Responsibility

Package personalization & ML-based recommendation: Evolve rule-based guest segmentation into a full ML recommendation system that surfaces the right insurance (e.g., trip cancellation, accidental damage coverage, on-trip protection) to each guest based on purchase intent, trip attributes, listing signals, and user history
Content personalization: Build models that rank and select benefit messaging for each guest—deciding which coverages to highlight, in what order, and with what framing—drawing on learnings from segmentation experiments and LLM-assisted content prototyping
Intent modeling: Develop and productionize ML models (from gradient-boosted trees to deep learning) that predict a guest's likelihood to value specific coverages, using structured booking data and unstructured signals
Journey understanding and optimization: Leverage reinforcement learning to personalize across user journey, with understanding on user preferences on entry point, price, notification frequency, and trip characteristics
High-velocity experimentation: Design and run adaptive experiments to maximize learning within tight traffic constraints
sequence ERFs strategically to keep the personalization roadmap moving

Requirements

5+ years of relevant industry experience (e.g., ML scientist, tech lead, junior faculty) and a Master's degree or PhD with 2+ yrs in a relevant field
Proven hands-on experience building and shipping personalization and recommendation systems at scale: strong intuition for feature engineering, user modeling, and the full ML lifecycle (training, serving, monitoring, iteration)
Strong fluency in Python and SQL
hands-on experience with TensorFlow or PyTorch, Airflow, and a data warehouse environment
Deep understanding of ML algorithms (gradient-boosted trees, deep learning, optimization) and experiment design—including A/B testing, multi-armed bandits, and the practical constraints of running experiments at scale
Exceptional communicator: you can make complex ML work legible to engineers, product managers, legal, and executives alike— written and verbal
Self-directed and passionate: you're energized by a fast-moving environment where there are always more good ideas than time
you hold yourself to a high standard without being asked, take initiative to unblock yourself, and find genuine satisfaction in shipping things that matter to guests
Product-oriented mindset: you keep the guest experience at the center of technical decisions and bring conceptual and innovative thinking to how you frame and solve problems

Nice to have

Experience with LLMs, Computer Vision or content-understanding topics is a strong plus
Causal inference skills are a plus
Publications or presentations in recognized venues are a plus

What we offer

bonus
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Employee Travel Credits

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Senior Data Scientist, Guest Travel Insurance (Algorithms)

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