[Hiring] Senior Data Scientist, Platform (Algorithms/Trust) @Airbnb

Role Description

The Content Integrity Data Science team helps build and protect trust by ensuring that the content on Airbnb is accurate, authentic, and aligned with our policies and community standards. This role 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.

• 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.

Qualifications

• 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.

Requirements

• 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.
• 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.
• Develop frameworks to analyze tradeoffs between enforcement accuracy, user experience, operational cost, and coverage, and propose strategies to optimize overall system effectiveness.
• 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.
• 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.

Benefits

• Base pay range: $177,000 — $208,000 USD.
• Role may also be eligible for bonus, equity, benefits, and Employee Travel Credits.

Company Description

Airbnb was born in 2007 and has since grown to over 5 million hosts who have welcomed over 2 billion guest arrivals globally. Trust is the foundation of a vibrant Airbnb community.