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.
Skipper: Building Airbnb’s embedded workflow engine
How Airbnb built a lightweight workflow engine to solve durable execution.
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.
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.
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.
Viaduct, Five Years On: Modernizing the Data-Oriented Service Mesh
A more powerful engine and a simpler API for our data-oriented mesh
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
How Airbnb Measures Listing Lifetime Value
A deep dive on the framework that lets us identify the most valuable listings for our guests.