Principal Machine Learning Engineer- LLM Fine-tuning and Optimization

📋 Job Overview

As a principal machine learning engineer, you will be responsible for fine-tuning state-of-the-art LLMs for diverse use cases while optimizing models for high-performance deployment on Airbnb’s ML Infrastructure. You will partner with product managers, software engineers, data scientists and operation teams to brainstorm, design and develop AI products such as AI Assistant, Autonomous agent, recommendation, travel planning, and many more products that make meaningful impacts in the world of travel.

🏢 About Airbnb

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 Role

Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence are at the heart of the Airbnb product. From Trust to Payments, and from Customer Service to Marketing we rely on ML to ensure that guests and hosts have the best possible experience with Airbnb. The CS AI product team is responsible for driving CSxAI (Customer Support x Artificial Intelligence) initiatives by adopting the Generative AI technologies to enable an intelligent, scalable and exceptional service experience.

✅ Key Responsibilities

• Work with large scale structured and unstructured data; explore, experiment, build and continuously improve foundation models for Airbnb product, business and operational use cases.
• Create a multi-year tech roadmap that enables our team to stay on the leading edge of the rapidly evolving AI landscape and leverage the best in class technologies to deliver customer benefits.
• Continuously evaluate recent and upcoming large foundational models, ensuring the selection and refinement of the highest quality models for enhanced performance and efficiency.
• Hands-on prototype, develop and productionize LLM models and pipelines at scale, including both batch and real-time use cases.
• Drive key AI architectural decisions for products, and contribute to Airbnb’s ML platform architecture and strategy.

📌 Required Qualifications

• PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Mathematics, Statistics, or related technical field.
• 10+ years of experience with developing machine learning models and products at scale from inception to business impact.
• Programming experience in Python and hands-on experience with frameworks such as PyTorch.
• Proven record of training, fine tuning, optimizing models and inference run-time
• Post-training experience in areas like data processing for fine-tuning; responsible LLMs; LLM alignment; reinforcement learning; efficient training and inference; language model evaluation; and/or multilingual and multimodal modeling.
• Or specialized experience in runtime optimizations, model quantization, compression, on-device inference, GPU inference, pytorch, kernel development

⭐ Desirable Experience

• PhD in AI, machine learning, data science, or related technical fields.
• Publications at peer-reviewed AI conferences (e.g., NeurIPS, CVPR, ICML, ICLR, ICCV, and ACL).
• Customer Support Systems: Experience with AI technologies in customer support applications.
• Agile Practice for AI production: Experience with the entire AI product development lifecycle from incubation to production at scale, following agile practices in the Applied AI/ML domain.
• Infrastructure Acumen: Experience deploying and scaling business-critical AI services and driving architectural requirements on ML infrastructures

🎁 Benefits

• Base pay range: $292,000 — $365,000 USD
• This role may also be eligible for bonus, equity, benefits, and Employee Travel Credits.

🛂 Visa & Eligibility

• 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.