Data Scientist - Inference, Cancellations

Job Description

Airbnb has become a global platform that connects travelers and hosts from over 81,000 cities. Our mission is to enable a world where anyone can belong anywhere. Expanding our community to new types of hosts is critical to our mission.

Airbnb’s mission is to make people around the world feel like they can belong anywhere. We want our guests to be able to find any type of place that they need, wherever they are — from private rooms for the social traveler to entire homes for the large family, from event spaces for an offsite to the perfect venue for that rustic wedding.

About Market Dynamics

The Market Dynamics team directly impacts the success of guests, hosts and Airbnb’s business by driving price competitiveness, establishing effective cancellation policies, and optimizing Airbnb’s fees and monetization strategy. The team also provides a common understanding of marketplace dynamics through data acquisition and models that the entire Homes organization can use to inform strategy, power products, and drive growth.

Our Inference Data Scientists are deep in understanding the complications of running experiments in a two-sided marketplace, power analysis and stopping criterions, and statistical models to improve power/significance. Another interesting problem space is understanding what to do when we are unable to conduct experiments. We’re looking for a data scientist with expertise in causal inference to join our team and work on a variety of initiatives from core product to new strategic projects. Sample projects include:

• How should we structure our fees?
• How can we prevent and mitigate cancellations?
• How can we best help hosts set the right prices?
• Where should we invest in onboarding new supply and new demand?

Qualifications

• A passion for Airbnb’s mission of helping people Belong Anywhere
• 3+ years in industry experience and a Master's degree in a quantitative field; PhD is a plus
• Experience with languages used for querying (e.g. Hive/Pig/SQL), preprocessing (e.g. unix/python), and statistical analysis (e.g. R/Matlab/Stata)
• Hands on experience with product analytics/experimentation, a proven ability to work cross-functionally and a drive to create impactful change
• Deep knowledge of statistics along with great intuition for applying that knowledge effectively to practical data science problems
• Strong written and verbal communication skills and a high level of comfort writing for executive audiences.

Benefits

• Stock
• $2,000 yearly employee travel coupon
• Competitive salary
• Paid time off
• Medical, dental, & vision insurance
• Life & disability coverage
• 401K
• Flexible Spending Accounts
• Apple equipment
• Daily breakfast, lunch, and dinner