Staff Data Scientist, Platform (Inference/Payments)

The Community You Will Join:

The Payments organization at Airbnb seeks to become a global leader in trusted, transparent, and frictionless payment services to empower our diverse global community. As our platform grows, the payments team is building a scalable platform to support global scale, helping the company grow by bringing new markets, products, and technologies to the platform, and protecting our community & platform from fraud – all while ensuring our platform experience is seamless for our guests and hosts. Our Data Science team enables this mission by working alongside a deeply cross-functional organization to provide reliable measurement frameworks to deliver robust data insights, build and enable state-of-the-art data products/models, and provide actionable and reliable business guidance.

The Difference You Will Make:

We are looking for a passionate Staff-level Data Scientist to lead quantitative measurement efforts and bring novel scientific approaches to drive decision making across our platform’s payment experience. This data scientist will perform careful hypothesis generation, causal inference framework development, and model development to ideate and drive payment strategies on our platform.

Our Data Scientists have a deep understanding of causal framework development, statistical analysis & modeling, and the complications of running experiment/quasi-experimental methods in a two-sided marketplace. They have keen business sense and are able to utilize their findings to communicate across a wide range of partners to drive our data & product roadmaps. They are not only the trusted data expert on their team, but also a storyteller.

Examples of projects you may work on include, development of novel metrics and frameworks that can efficiently measure outcomes (often balancing competing tradeoffs), generating intelligence on long term impact measurements and measuring the impacts of interventions on specific segments of users, and building/evaluating novel data products/models to optimize guest, host, and business outcomes.

A Typical Day:

• Inference: Develop and apply causal inference methods, including experimental, econometric regressions, and quasi-experimental methods to measure a wide-range of platform/product impacts.


• AI/ML: Build methods for robust evaluation of ML/AI model efficiency and performance. Ability to identify use-cases for and develop predictive models to classify, segment, and interpret our users’ behavior.


• Optimization: Develop methodologies to explore/simulate the impact of new interventions and develop data products to optimize product/operational strategies.


• Communication: Deliver robust research reports and effective data visualizations. Collaborate with and present to stakeholders to identify opportunities and communicate findings, and drive impact.


• Empowerment: Think strategically about opportunities to improve and scale our brand measurement and customer insights.

Required qualifications

• 9+ years of industry experience in a quantitative analysis role with a Master’s degree in a quantitative field (math / economics / statistics, and etc.), or 6+ years of experience with a PhD degree.


• Strong knowledge of causal inference, experimentation, and statistical modeling.


• Skilled in statistical programming (Python or R) and database usage (SQL)


• Proven ability to communicate clearly and effectively to audiences of varying technical levels


• Ability to translate complex findings and results into compelling narratives that drive impact


• Excellent project management, communication, and teamwork skills


• Payments/Risk Domain expertise is a strong plus

Your Location:

This position is US - Remote Eligible. The role may include occasional work at an Airbnb office or attendance at offsites, as agreed to with your manager. While the position is Remote Eligible, you must live in a state where Airbnb, Inc. has a registered entity. Click here for the up-to-date list of excluded states. This list is continuously evolving, so please check back with us if the state you live in is on the exclusion list. If your position is employed by another Airbnb entity, your recruiter will inform you what states you are eligible to work from.

Our Commitment To Inclusion & Belonging:

Airbnb is committed to working with the broadest talent pool possible. We believe diverse ideas foster innovation and engagement, and allow us to attract creatively-led people, and to develop the best products, services and solutions. All qualified individuals are encouraged to apply.

We strive to also provide a disability inclusive application and interview process. If you are a candidate with a disability and require reasonable accommodation in order to submit an application, please contact us at: reasonableaccommodations@airbnb.com. Please include your full name, the role you’re applying for and the accommodation necessary to assist you with the recruiting process.

We ask that you only reach out to us if you are a candidate whose disability prevents you from being able to complete our online application.