Automating Data Protection at Scale, Part 2

Part two of a series on how we provide powerful, automated, and scalable data privacy and security engineering capabilities at AirbnbElizabeth Nammour, Pinyao Guo, Wendy JinIntroductionIn Part 1 of our blog series, we introduced the Data Protection Platform (DPP), which enables us to protect data in compliance with global regulations and security requirements....

1w

Migrating Kafka transparently between Zookeeper clusters

Learn more about how to migrate your Kafka cluster from one Zookeeper cluster to another without any user impact.By: Edmund MokIntroductionKafka is an open-source distributed event-streaming platform. It depends on Zookeeper, another open-source distributed coordination system, to store cluster metadata. At Airbnb, Kafka forms the backbone of our data...

2w

Designing for Productivity in a Large-Scale iOS Application

How innovation in technology and people processes have enabled iOS developers to remain productive in a large codebase.Every iOS engineer remembers the joy of seeing their first application running on an iOS device. The human-centric interface of the iPhone brings the program to life. When you choose iOS development as a career, that joy grows as your...

3w

How Airbnb Tech Fosters a Culture of Learning

Leveraging technical learning and development to enable engineers to do their best work.Authors: Hanna Dooley, Jennifer Rice, Tamera ScholzIntroductionThe Airbnb TechED team believes each individual’s success is critical to the health of our technical teams. This fundamental belief in the power of human potential drives us to bring high quality, relevant...

4w

The Airflow Smart Sensor Service

Consolidating long-running, lightweight tasks for improved resource utilizationBy: Yingbo Wang, Kevin YangIntroductionAirflow is a platform to programmatically author, schedule, and monitor data pipelines. A typical Airflow cluster supports thousands of workflows, called DAGs (directed acyclic graphs), and there could be tens of thousands of concurrently...

4w

My Journey to Airbnb — Rachel Zhao

My Journey to Airbnb — Rachel ZhaoFrom an uncertain software engineering student to Head of Search Engineering.If there’s one thing travel teaches us, it’s that the journey is just as important as the destination. With this in mind, we’re launching a new series of blog posts to bring you the personal stories of our amazing Airfam! How did they initially...

4w

How Airbnb Enables Consistent Data Consumption at Scale

Part-III: Building a coherent consumption experienceBy: Amit Pahwa, Cristian Figueroa, Donghan Zhang, Haim Grosman, John Bodley, Jonathan Parks, Jenny Liu, Krishna Bhupatiraju, Maggie Zhu, Mike Lin, Philip Weiss, Robert Chang, Shao Xie, Sylvia Tomiyama, Toby Mao, Xiaohui SunIntroductionIn the first post of this series, we highlighted the role Minerva...

Sep 2021

Commitment to Craft

Ari Balogh, CTO at Airbnb, shares how striving towards excellence has served us well in a time of uncertainty.If you’ve ever been part of a startup, you understand the importance of speed. Sometimes it feels like nothing else matters, since getting your products to market quickly can determine whether you survive. When Airbnb was an emerging company...

Sep 2021

Automating Data Protection at Scale, Part 1

Part one of a series on how we provide powerful, automated, and scalable data privacy and security engineering capabilities at Airbnb.Elizabeth Nammour, Wendy Jin, Shengpu LiuOur community of hosts and guests trust that we will keep their data safe and honor their privacy rights. With frequent news reports of data security breaches, coupled with global...

Sep 2021

Task-Oriented Conversational AI in Airbnb Customer Support

How Airbnb is powering automated support to enhance the host and guest experienceGavin Li, Mia ZhaoCustomer Support (CS) can make or break a guest’s travel experience. To support Airbnb’s community of guests and Hosts, we have been investing heavily in developing intelligent CS solutions leveraging state-of-the-art natural language processing (NLP),...

Aug 2021