Skipper, Airbnb’s embedded workflow engine, is now open source
Durable workflows, running inside your service with no separate orchestration cluster.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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