Skipper, Airbnb’s embedded workflow engine, is now open source
Durable workflows, running inside your service with no separate orchestration cluster.
Airbnb Engineering & Data Science
The people, ideas, and technology at the heart of Airbnb.
Latest articles
How Airbnb evaluates coding models
How we built a benchmark from our engineers' work, stopped models from grading themselves, and now run it on every release.
Frontier quality at 1% of the cost: a production benchmark of LLM classifiers
We benchmarked a fine-tuned E2B model against frontier APIs on a real production classification task. It matched their quality in under 100ms, at about a hundredth of the cost.
CASTLE: training natural language search before the first real query
How we addressed the cold-start problem for Airbnb’s natural language search by jointly generating synthetic training data — queries and relevance labels — from de-identified booking and search signals.
Beyond synthetic testing: Capturing and replaying real database workloads at Airbnb
How we capture real production database traffic at Airbnb and replay it offline to load-test, plan capacity, and de-risk upgrades.
Personalization without user identity
How Airbnb uses proximity signals to personalize without relying on individual user history.
Explore by topic
- AI/MLSearch, ranking, LLMs and the systems that learn17 articles
- DataForecasting, measurement and data science10 articles
- InfrastructureStorage, observability and platforms at scale23 articles
- MobileNative iOS and Android engineering1 article
- WebFrontend architecture and performance1 article
- Open SourceProjects we build, manage and sponsor4 articles
- PaymentsMoving money across the world1 article
- PeopleThe journeys that brought us here6 articles
More to read
Open source
At Airbnb, Open Source is at the heart of everything we do.
Projects we build, manage, and sponsor — 22 of them and counting.
All 22 projects
AirflowUse Apache Airflow to author workflows as directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) of tasks
Apache SupersetApache Superset is a modern, enterprise-ready business intelligence web application.
ViaductA GraphQL-based system that provides a unified interface for accessing and interacting with any data source. It can be used by services as a way to access data efficiently and safely.
HorizonCalendarA declarative and performant iOS calendar UI component that supports use cases ranging from simple date pickers all the way up to fully-featured calendar apps.
LottieEasily add high-quality animation to any native app. Lottie is an iOS, Android, and React Native library that renders After Effects animations in real time, allowing apps to use animations as easily as they use static images
ChrononA data platform for serving for AI/ML applications.
visxVisx is a collection of expressive, low-level visualization primitives for React
Epoxy for iOSEpoxy is a suite of declarative UI APIs for building iOS UIKit apps in Swift.
MavericksAn Android state management system built on top of Kotlin coroutines and Jetpack ViewModel.
JavaScript Style GuideA mostly reasonable approach to JavaScript.
Research
54 papers, 2018–2026
Research is an integral part of what we do at Airbnb Tech. We’re excited to share how we’re moving the needle.
Read the researchEvents
Tech talks, on replay
Upcoming tech talks and links to past events.
Watch the talks