Staff Software Engineer, Integrated Knowledge Management (RAG)

The Community You Will Join:

Providing world class customer service for our community of guests and hosts is a critical mission of Airbnb. This is an area of unprecedented scale and complexity. In no other domain does the efficiency and reliability of customer service technology translate directly into a competitive advantage, brand loyalty, and the bottom line of the business.

The Integrated Knowledge Management team, part of the Airbnb Community Support Platform, is foundational to creating the best customer service experience for our users. The Integrated Knowledge Management team is responsible for building robust and scalable platforms to enable Airbnb’s content and knowledge to be leveraged across users, both internal and external, and to also serve as the authoritative knowledge source for Conversational AI and LLM applications.

The Difference You Will Make:

As a Staff Software Engineer on the Integrated Knowledge Management team, you will be in charge of developing solutions to scale and optimize retrieval and ranking of content, knowledge & contextual information, across all of Airbnb through building out our next generation Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) platform. You will be deeply involved in building highly available and scalable services in close collaboration with other engineering, ML/AI, product, content, data science and operations teams to meet the ever evolving needs of Airbnb’s Community Support Platform. There are many problems to solve in this domain including expanding our RAG systems to support new knowledge and solution sources, building the capabilities required for Airbnb’s expanding suite of AI powered contextual in-product support applications, and implementing ways to improve velocity around experimentation and evaluation.

A Typical Day:

• Lead the scoping, technical requirements, architecture, and the implementation of new features and functionality.
• Analyze data, build hypotheses, experiment, learn and iterate to improve the Integrated Knowledge Management services.
• Collaborate with cross-functional working groups (frontend/backend/ML engineers, design, product and operation teams), in both North America and globally, to design and build end-to-end product solutions to improve Airbnb’s customer service experience.
• Mentor other engineers in developing their technical, operational, and collaboration skills.
• Advocate and participate in efforts to advance Airbnb’s engineering processes and technical foundations.

Your Expertise:

• 9+ years of backend software development experience.
• 4+ years of recent industry experience building search, retrieval and ranking systems to power end-to-end Machine Learning powered products; recent industry experience building Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems a must.
• Strong proficiency in at least one major backend programming language (e.g., Java, Kotlin, Scala, Python)
• Proven track record of delivering backend solutions in a collaborative environment, from ideation and planning to implementation and launch.
• Experience with architectural patterns of large-scale systems, including well-designed APIs, high-volume data pipelines, and efficient algorithms.
• Demonstrated ability to make data-driven decisions, articulate technical trade-offs, and communicate effectively with cross-functional partners.
• BS, MS or PhD in CS or related field

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 wi