Skipper, Airbnb’s embedded workflow engine, is now open source
Durable workflows, running inside your service with no separate orchestration cluster.
Tech Blog
Learn about the people, ideas, and technology at the heart of Airbnb.
50 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.
The guest journey, updated in real time: extending Airbnb’s sequence recommender with Chronon
How two new Chronon capabilities, Push Mode and NRT Model Transform, allows us to provide more relevant search results instantly as a guest explores, rather than waiting for the next batch run.
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 audit-ready infrastructure.
How we knew COVID was over (and what our models had to unlearn)
When we retrain, when we rebuild, and when we leave a model alone.
Engineering
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 Authentication at the intersection of product intuition and technical architecture.
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; not an afterthought.
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 right listings at the right time.
From weeks to a day: how we made LLM evaluation fast enough to iterate on
Training an LLM is the easy part. The hard part is designing experiments and evaluations that you can trust enough to know whether the new model is actually an improvement.
Engineering
Scaling beyond one: How Airbnb evolved its data architecture for a multi-product world
How Airbnb’s data engineers and analytics engineers built a consistent and flexible data modeling framework to support the expansion into Homes, Experiences, and Services.
Sitar-agent: Building a reliable dynamic configuration sidecar at scale
How Airbnb built a Kubernetes sidecar to deliver dynamic configuration reliably at scale.
When history fails you, borrow from geography
How Airbnb used sequential geographic recovery signals and prior propagation to generate reliable corridor-level forecasts when local data was scarce.
Scaling Airbnb’s identity graph with a unified knowledge graph infrastructure
How Airbnb shifts from PaaS to an internal knowledge graph infrastructure at scale.
Viaduct 1.0 and the future of Airbnb’s data mesh
Moving from an internal tool to a community-driven, production-ready data mesh.
Monitoring reliably at scale
Designing monitoring that works when everything else doesn’t.
Skipper: Building Airbnb’s embedded workflow engine
How Airbnb built a lightweight workflow engine to solve durable execution.
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 petabytes of logical time series data.
Privacy-first connections: Empowering social experiences at Airbnb
Discover how Airbnb prioritizes user privacy while building a more connected community, empowering guests to engage socially, connect confidently, and maintain control of their personal 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.
My Journey to Airbnb — Jonathan Woodard
From defensive end to cloud security engineer, meet Jonathan Woodard.
What COVID did to our forecasting models (and what we built to handle the next shock)
How Airbnb built forecasting models resilient enough to survive a global pandemic and whatever shock comes next.
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, and a fundamental reset of the developer experience.
Recommending Travel Destinations to Help Users Explore
How we built a destination recommendation model that helps users spark inspiration and narrow down choices to make journeys smoother.
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 to minutes.
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 migration from Mussel V1 to V2.
From Static Rate Limiting to Adaptive Traffic Management in Airbnb’s Key-Value Store
How Airbnb hardened Mussel, our key-value store, with smarter traffic controls to stay fast and reliable during traffic spikes.
Pay as a Local
How Airbnb rolled out 20+ locally relevant payment methods worldwide in just 14 months
Academic Publications & Airbnb Tech: 2025 Year in Review
2025 was a big year for research at Airbnb, as we made significant progress toward our mission to use AI, data science, and machine learning to become the best travel and living platform.
Safeguarding Dynamic Configuration Changes at Scale
How Airbnb ships dynamic config changes safely and reliably
My Journey to Airbnb — Anna Sulkina
Anna Sulkina has always been a traveler, and we’re lucky her travels have brought her to Airbnb. Anna is a Senior Director of Engineering, and she’s responsible for Application & Cloud infrastructure.
My Journey to Airbnb: Peter Coles
The story of Airbnb’s Head Economist for Policy and Director of Data Science involves geology, co-teaching with a Nobel Prize winner, and CSI. (No, not the hit TV franchise.)
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 data using a new directive.
Viaduct, Five Years On: Modernizing the Data-Oriented Service Mesh
A more powerful engine and a simpler API for our data-oriented mesh
Migrating Airbnb’s JVM Monorepo to Bazel
How we completed migrating our largest repo, the JVM monorepo, to Bazel.
Seamless Istio Upgrades at Scale
How Airbnb upgrades tens of thousands of pods on dozens of Kubernetes clusters to new Istio versions
Achieving High Availability with distributed database on Kubernetes at Airbnb
How to achieve high availability with distributed database on Kubernetes.
Understanding and Improving SwiftUI Performance
New techniques we’re using at Airbnb to improve and maintain performance of SwiftUI features at scale
Load Testing with Impulse at Airbnb
Comprehensive Load Testing with Load Generator, Dependency Mocker, Traffic Collector, and More
Listening, Learning, and Helping at Scale: How Machine Learning Transforms Airbnb’s Voice Support Experience
A look into how Airbnb uses speech recognition, intent detection, and language models to understand users and assist agents more effectively.
Accelerating Large-Scale Test Migration with LLMs
How Airbnb migrated nearly 3.5K Enzyme test files to React Testing Library in just 6 weeks using automation and LLMs
Embedding-Based Retrieval for Airbnb Search
Our journey in applying embedding-based retrieval techniques to build an accurate and scalable candidate retrieval system for Airbnb Homes search
How Airbnb Measures Listing Lifetime Value
A deep dive on the framework that lets us identify the most valuable listings for our guests.
My Journey to Airbnb — Michael Kinoti
Saying no to med school and following a dream all the way to Silicon Valley
My Journey to Airbnb — Veerabahu Chandran
Learning and growing in Airbnb’s new Bangalore Tech Center
My Journey to Airbnb — Florian Andes
From building airplanes to Staff Technical Program Manager at Airbnb
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