Senior Data Scientist - Anti-Discrimination & Equity, Trust

Airbnb was born in 2007 when two Hosts welcomed three guests to their San Francisco home, and has since grown to over 4 million Hosts who have welcomed more than 1 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:

As part of the Anti-Discrimination & Equity team, you will be a part of a groundbreaking group of technologists designing and building scalable and robust systems to detect and support the mitigation of inequities across the entire platform. Those inequities are discrepancies in the product experience that may be correlated with race or other demographic attributes, and are the result of explicit or implicit discrimination on an individual level (e.g., between hosts and guests), as well as broader, systemic inequities.

The Difference You Will Make:

You will be deeply involved in the technical details of expanding on the work we started with Project Lighthouse, in close collaboration with product, engineering and operations teams. Your work will help ensure that teams across the company are empowered with the insights necessary to address inequities within their features and surface areas, head-on -- ultimately enabling us to build a product that fosters true belonging amongst members of the Airbnb community.

The work of making our platform one that is more just and equitable is challenging, but critical. We’re looking for talented data scientists who are ready and excited to take on this important and unsolved problem.

A Typical Day:

• Designing and implementing frameworks that measure and help mitigate potential inequities within the Airbnb user experience.
• Defining and evaluating key metrics in an unstructured problem space. Developing and communicating a robust understanding of what moves these metrics and why.
• Developing and implementing research and auditing methodologies to understand the impact of machine learning with regards to fairness.
• Working closely with a range of stakeholders, including external civil rights and privacy organizations and academics, to improve our technology.
• Investigating challenging questions around the user experience to understand the voice of our users at scale.
• Contributing to the fairness in the technology research community
• Executing projects with great complexity and a longer time horizon than is typical on most product teams. Our projects can take 3-24 months to complete, and, as a result, require a sustained level of commitment and attention, as well as thorough, thoughtful, and rigorous documentation. 

Your Expertise:

• Advanced degree in a quantitative field. PhD is a plus.
• 5+ years of relevant industry experience developing scientific frameworks, building machine learning models, or implementing advanced experimentation techniques
• Demonstrated ability to create and drive technical and impactful roadmaps for the business, and lead seamless execution of it.
• Proven ability to tailor your solutions to business problems in a cross functional team.
• Strong programming skills (Python preferred).
• Ability to communicate clearly and effectively to cross functional partners of varying technical levels.
• A recognition of the problem we’re trying to solve, and curiosity about it. You recognize that issues of bias, discrimination, and systemic inequities are real, measurable problems, and you are eager to learn more about them.
• Experience with advanced experimentation techniques is a plus.
• Deep understanding of modern machine learning techniques and their mathematical underpinning, such as classification, clustering, optimization, deep neural network and natural language processing is a plus.
• Data analytical and data engineering experience is a plus (Hive, Presto, Spark preferred).
• Experience productionizing real-time machine learning models is a plus.

How We'll Take Care of You:

The starting base pay for this role is between $152,000 and $203,500. The actual base pay is dependent upon many factors, such as: education, experience, and skills. The base pay range is subject to change and may be modified in the future. This role may also be eligible for bonus, equity, benefits, and Employee Travel Credits.

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.