Principal Machine Learning Engineer- LLM Fine-tuning and Optimization

Airbnb

2d•$292,000 - $365,000•Remote

About The Position

Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence are central to Airbnb's product, impacting areas from Trust and Payments to Customer Service and Marketing. The CS AI product team focuses on Customer Support x Artificial Intelligence (CSxAI) initiatives, leveraging Generative AI to create intelligent, scalable, and exceptional service experiences. This team develops and enhances AI models, ML services, and tools, including LLM fine-tuning, alignment, optimization, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)/Search, LLM evaluation, automated testing, feedback-based learning, and guardrails for various Airbnb applications.

Requirements

PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Mathematics, Statistics, or related technical field.
10+ years of experience developing machine learning models and products at scale from inception to business impact.
Programming experience in Python.
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.

Nice To Haves

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).
Experience with AI technologies in customer support applications.
Experience with the entire AI product development lifecycle from incubation to production at scale, following agile practices in the Applied AI/ML domain.
Experience deploying and scaling business-critical AI services and driving architectural requirements on ML infrastructures.

Responsibilities

Fine-tuning state-of-the-art LLMs for diverse use cases.
Optimizing models for high-performance deployment on Airbnb’s ML Infrastructure.
Partnering with product managers, software engineers, data scientists, and operations teams to design and develop AI products such as AI Assistant, Autonomous agent, recommendation systems, and travel planning tools.
Working with large-scale structured and unstructured data to explore, experiment, build, and continuously improve foundation models for Airbnb's product, business, and operational use cases.
Creating a multi-year tech roadmap to stay at the forefront of the AI landscape and leverage best-in-class technologies.
Continuously evaluating recent and upcoming large foundational models to ensure selection and refinement of high-quality models for enhanced performance and efficiency.
Hands-on prototyping, development, and productionization of LLM models and pipelines at scale, for both batch and real-time use cases.
Driving key AI architectural decisions for products and contributing to Airbnb’s ML platform architecture and strategy.