Jobs / United States / Airbnb
Principal Machine Learning Engineer- LLM Fine-tuning and Optimization
Airbnb · 🇺🇸 United States
Sponsorship verdict
Sponsorship possible
One solid signal, not two — worth applying, and worth asking about sponsorship early.
- Employer is on a government sponsor recordThe US Department of Labor certified 167 H-1B/E-3 labor condition applications for this employer between Oct 2025 and Jun 2026 (latest Jun 2026) — the step every H-1B hire needs first. USCIS also records 71 H-1B approvals in FY2023. Source: LCA disclosure data (US Department of Labor (OFLC)).
- The posting doesn’t mention sponsorshipSilence isn’t a refusal — ask the recruiter before investing much time.
- No salary bar for this routeH-1B has no fixed salary bar: the employer must pay at least the prevailing wage for the role and area. Cap-subject employers enter a lottery weighted by wage level. Source: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/12/29/2025-23853/weighted-selection-process-for-registrants-and-petitioners-seeking-to-file-cap-subject-h-1b, rules effective 2026-02-27.
- What Airbnb paid sponsored hires in similar roles8 certified filings for “Machine Learning Engineer” (Data Scientists) in WA: $179k–$196k, median $185k. Most were filed at wage level II (50%) — 2 lottery entries, ≈31% projected selection odds for cap-subject employers. Source: US Department of Labor LCA disclosure data (Oct 2025 – Jun 2026).
- Confirmed live todayWhen a source last listed this job as open.
US H-1B: cap-subject employers enter a lottery weighted by wage level — Level I gets 1 entry, Level IV gets 4 (DHS projected selection odds ≈15% at Level I to ≈61% at Level IV). Universities and non-profit research employers are cap-exempt. The $100,000 fee for new petitions from abroad is currently blocked by a court order (appeal pending).
A verdict summarises public evidence; it is not legal advice and never a guarantee — the employer and the immigration authority decide. Sign in to factor in where you can already work.
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Sponsor Radar — Airbnb
The US Department of Labor certified 167 H-1B/E-3 labor condition applications for this employer between Oct 2025 and Jun 2026 (latest Jun 2026) — the step every H-1B hire needs first. USCIS also records 71 H-1B approvals in FY2023. Source: LCA disclosure data (US Department of Labor (OFLC)).
Past sponsorship or register membership never guarantees sponsorship for this vacancy or for you. Full Sponsor Radar for Airbnb →
About the role
Airbnb was born in 2007 when two hosts welcomed three guests to their San Francisco home, and has since grown to over 5 million hosts who have welcomed over 2 billion guest arrivals in almost every country across the globe. Every day, hosts offer unique stays and experiences that make it possible for guests to connect with communities in a more authentic way. Airbnb was born in 2007 when two hosts welcomed three guests to their San Francisco home, and has since grown to over 5 million hosts who have welcomed over 2 billion guest arrivals in almost every country across the globe. Every day, hosts offer unique stays and experiences that make it possible for guests to connect with communities in a more authentic way. The Community You Will Join: Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence are at the heart of the Airbnb product. From Trust to Payments, and from Customer Service to Marketing we rely on ML to ensure that guests and hosts have the best possible experience with Airbnb. The CS AI product team is responsible for driving CSxAI (Customer Support x Artificial Intelligence) initiatives by adopting the Generative AI technologies to enable an intelligent, scalable and exceptional service experience. The team develops and enhances various AI models, ML services and tools including LLM fine-tuning, alignment and optimization, RAG/Search, LLM evaluation and testing automation, feedback-based learning and guardrail for a wide range of applications in Airbnb. What you will do: As a principal machine learning engineer, you will be responsible for fine-tuning state-of-the-art LLMs for diverse use cases while optimizing models for high-performance deployment on Airbnb’s ML Infrastructure. You will partner with product managers, software engineers, data scientists and operation teams to brainstorm, design and develop AI products such as AI Assistant, Autonomous agent, recommendation, travel planning, and many more products that make meaningful impacts in the world of travel. Your responsibilities: • Work with large scale structured and unstructured data; explore, experiment, build and continuously improve foundation models for Airbnb product, business and operational use cases. • Create a multi-year tech roadmap that enables our team to stay on the leading edge of the rapidly evolving AI landscape and leverage the best in class technologies to deliver customer benefits. • Continuously evaluate recent and upcoming large foundational models, ensuring the selection and refinement of the highest quality models for enhanced performance and efficiency. • Hands-on prototype, develop and productionize LLM models and pipelines at scale, including both batch and real-time use cases. • Drive key AI architectural decisions for products, and contribute to Airbnb’s ML platform architecture and strategy. Minimum Qualifications : • PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Mathematics, Statistics, or related technical field. • 10+ years of experience with developing machine learning models and products at scale from inception to business impact. • Programming experience in Python and hands-on experience with frameworks such as PyTorch. • Proven record of training, fine tuning, optimizing models and inference run-time • Post-training experience in areas like data processing for fine-tuning; responsible LLMs; LLM alignment; reinforcement learning; efficient training and inference; language model evaluation; and/or multilingual and multimodal modeling. • Or specialized experience in runtime optimizations, model quantization, compression, on-device inference, GPU inference, pytorch, kernel development Preferred Qualifications: • PhD in AI, machine learning, data science, or related technical fields. Publications at peer-reviewed AI co