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The Airbnb Tech Blog - Medium

Creative engineers and data scientists building a world where you can belong anywhere. http://airbnb.io - Medium

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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 ...
Posted on 13 October 2026 | 5:01 pm

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.By: Zuofei Wang, ...
Posted on 6 October 2026 | 5:01 pm

Personalization without user identity

How Airbnb uses proximity signals to personalize without relying on individual user history.By: Wei Jiang, Bin Xu, Bharathi Thangamani, Weiwei Guo,...
Posted on 29 September 2026 | 5:01 pm

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 explore...
Posted on 17 September 2026 | 5:01 pm

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...
Posted on 15 September 2026 | 5:06 pm

Project Lighthouse — Part 3: Introducing project-lighthouse-anonymize

Project Lighthouse — Part 3: Introducing project-lighthouse-anonymizeThe data in Project Lighthouse is powered by privacy-preserving anonymization ...
Posted on 25 August 2026 | 5:01 pm

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.By: Harrison KatzA forecast that carries weightThe Forecasting Data Science team ...
Posted on 19 August 2026 | 5:01 pm

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 interse...
Posted on 12 August 2026 | 5:01 pm

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.Nestl...
Posted on 28 July 2026 | 5:01 pm

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.By: Daochen Zh...
Posted on 21 July 2026 | 5:01 pm