Tech Blog

Learn about the people, ideas, and technology at the heart of Airbnb

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Beyond the model: Engineering AI infra with scientific judgement

How Airbnb’s agent harness transforms unstructured data exploration by encoding scientific methodology into scalable, reproducible, and...

AI/ML Data

How we knew COVID was over (and what our models...

When we retrain, when we rebuild, and when we leave a model alone.

AI/ML Data

Flexible Authentication: Reimagining authentication for millions of users at Airbnb

Rebuilding login and signup surfaced product insights, not just technical challenges. Here’s how we designed Flexible...

Eval-driven development: Lessons from evaluating GenAI at scale

How Airbnb teams build trustworthy Generative AI products by treating evaluation as a first-class engineering discipline;...

AI/ML

Personalizing Airbnb search by learning from the guest journey

How we built a Transformer-based sequence model that encodes years of guest behavior to surface the...

AI/ML

From weeks to a day: how we made LLM evaluation...

Training an LLM is the easy part. The hard part is designing experiments and evaluations that...

AI/ML

Scaling beyond one: How Airbnb evolved its data architecture for...

How Airbnb’s data engineers and analytics engineers built a consistent and flexible data modeling framework to...

Sitar-agent: Building a reliable dynamic configuration sidecar at scale

How Airbnb built a Kubernetes sidecar to deliver dynamic configuration reliably at scale.

Infrastructure

When history fails you, borrow from geography

How Airbnb used sequential geographic recovery signals and prior propagation to generate reliable corridor-level forecasts when...

Data

Scaling Airbnb’s identity graph with a unified knowledge graph infrastructure

How Airbnb shifts from PaaS to an internal knowledge graph infrastructure at scale.

Infrastructure

Viaduct 1.0 and the future of Airbnb’s data mesh

Moving from an internal tool to a community-driven, production-ready data mesh.

Infrastructure Open Source

Monitoring reliably at scale

Designing monitoring that works when everything else doesn’t.

Infrastructure

Skipper: Building Airbnb’s embedded workflow engine

How Airbnb built a lightweight workflow engine to solve durable execution.

Infrastructure

Building a fault-tolerant metrics storage system at Airbnb

How we built a storage system that ingests 50 million samples per second and stores 2.5...

Infrastructure

Privacy-first connections: Empowering social experiences at Airbnb

Discover how Airbnb prioritizes user privacy while building a more connected community, empowering guests to engage...

Data

Building a high-volume metrics pipeline with OpenTelemetry and vmagent

A production-tested approach for moving a large-scale metrics pipeline from StatsD to OpenTelemetry and Prometheus.

Infrastructure

My Journey to Airbnb — Jonathan Woodard

From defensive end to cloud security engineer, meet Jonathan Woodard.

People

What COVID did to our forecasting models (and what we...

How Airbnb built forecasting models resilient enough to survive a global pandemic and whatever shock comes...

Data

From vendors to vanguard: Airbnb’s hard-won lessons in observability ownership

How a complex, large-scale migration to an in-house observability platform led to superior tooling, consistent data,...

Infrastructure

Recommending Travel Destinations to Help Users Explore

How we built a destination recommendation model that helps users spark inspiration and narrow down choices...

AI/ML

It Wasn’t a Culture Problem: Upleveling Alert Development at Airbnb

How we changed our Observability as Code alert review process and cut development cycles from weeks...

Infrastructure

Improving Search Ranking for Maps

How Airbnb is adapting ranking for our map interface.

AI/ML

Building a Next-Generation Key-Value Store at Airbnb

How we completely rearchitected Mussel, our storage engine for derived data, and lessons learned from the...

Infrastructure

From Static Rate Limiting to Adaptive Traffic Management in Airbnb’s...

How Airbnb hardened Mussel, our key-value store, with smarter traffic controls to stay fast and reliable...

Infrastructure

Pay as a Local

How Airbnb rolled out 20+ locally relevant payment methods worldwide in just 14 months

Payments

Academic Publications & Airbnb Tech: 2025 Year in Review

2025 was a big year for research at Airbnb, as we made significant progress toward our...

AI/ML Data Infrastructure

Safeguarding Dynamic Configuration Changes at Scale

How Airbnb ships dynamic config changes safely and reliably

Infrastructure

My Journey to Airbnb — Anna Sulkina

Anna Sulkina has always been a traveler, and we’re lucky her travels have brought her to...

Infrastructure People

My Journey to Airbnb: Peter Coles

The story of Airbnb’s Head Economist for Policy and Director of Data Science involves geology, co-teaching...

People

Code of conduct

Airbnb's Code of conduct for Open Source.

Open Source

GraphQL Data Mocking at Scale with LLMs and @generateMock

How Airbnb combines GraphQL infra, product context, and LLMs to generate and maintain convincing, type-safe mock...

Infrastructure

Viaduct, Five Years On: Modernizing the Data-Oriented Service Mesh

A more powerful engine and a simpler API for our data-oriented mesh

Data Infrastructure Open Source

Migrating Airbnb’s JVM Monorepo to Bazel

How we completed migrating our largest repo, the JVM monorepo, to Bazel.

Infrastructure

Seamless Istio Upgrades at Scale

How Airbnb upgrades tens of thousands of pods on dozens of Kubernetes clusters to new Istio...

Infrastructure

Achieving High Availability with distributed database on Kubernetes at Airbnb

How to achieve high availability with distributed database on Kubernetes.

Infrastructure

Understanding and Improving SwiftUI Performance

New techniques we’re using at Airbnb to improve and maintain performance of SwiftUI features at scale

Mobile Web

Load Testing with Impulse at Airbnb

Comprehensive Load Testing with Load Generator, Dependency Mocker, Traffic Collector, and More

Infrastructure

Listening, Learning, and Helping at Scale: How Machine Learning Transforms...

A look into how Airbnb uses speech recognition, intent detection, and language models to understand users...

AI/ML

Accelerating Large-Scale Test Migration with LLMs

How Airbnb migrated nearly 3.5K Enzyme test files to React Testing Library in just 6 weeks...

AI/ML Infrastructure

Embedding-Based Retrieval for Airbnb Search

Our journey in applying embedding-based retrieval techniques to build an accurate and scalable candidate retrieval system...

AI/ML

How Airbnb Measures Listing Lifetime Value

A deep dive on the framework that lets us identify the most valuable listings for our...

AI/ML Data

My Journey to Airbnb — Michael Kinoti

Saying no to med school and following a dream all the way to Silicon Valley

People

My Journey to Airbnb — Veerabahu Chandran

Learning and growing in Airbnb’s new Bangalore Tech Center

People

My Journey to Airbnb — Florian Andes

From building airplanes to Staff Technical Program Manager at Airbnb

People