Lead - Advanced Analytics, Gurgaon

Airbnb was born in 2007 when two Hosts welcomed three guests to their San Francisco home, and has since grown to over 4 million Hosts who have welcomed more than 1 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 Analytics Centre of Excellence (ACOE) at Airbnb, based in India, is a hub of knowledge and expertise that aims to provide data-driven decision-making, enabling Airbnb's business goals. The ACOE's vision is to build a world-class analytics organization that provides scalable, AI-enabled analytics. We work with various business functions such as payments, trust, digital, customer support, hosting, sales, social, compliance, risk, platforms and partnerships & economics.

The ACOE's delivery framework is designed to provide relevant and contextual insights for data-driven decisions. This includes a one-stop solution for metrics, dashboards driving actionable insights, optimization of performance, measuring pre/post feature impact, sizing the ROI of opportunities, prioritization of opportunities, anomaly-driven alerting mechanisms, root cause analysis of metric deviation, and exploratory hypothesis testing.

The Community You Will Join:

We are looking for a Lead Advanced Analyst in our India Analytics team who works with the Community Support business. The analyst must have deep functional expertise in building and scaling analytical solutions and serve as a strategic thought partner to product teams and business leaders across marketplace teams driving insights, recommendations, and data-informed decisions at scale. This role will sit under the Advanced Analytics family and support Business leaders within our Strategic Planning & Operations organization.

The Difference You Will Make:

• Serve as the primary data thought partner to product and business leaders across Community Support, providing strategic insights, recommendations, and enabling data-informed decisions at an organizational level.
• Drive day-to-day product analytics and create scalable, reusable data tools and frameworks that elevate the entire team's analytical capability.
• Build and scale advanced analytical capabilities; leverage Airbnb's state-of-the-art machine learning infrastructure and central data science tools to collaborate with engineers, product managers, designers, and operations agents to achieve shared, cross-functional goals.
• Champion AI-first analytics practices across the team identifying high-impact opportunities to integrate LLM-based tools, AutoML, and advanced AI capabilities into analytical workflows.
• Demonstrate a strong sense of urgency and commitment to Airbnb's mission of belonging.
• Develop a deep understanding of how guests and hosts interact with our Community Support platform and how we can manage risk while meeting regulatory compliance requirements through structured and unstructured data sources.
• Mentor and guide junior analysts, fostering a culture of analytical rigor, curiosity, and continuous skill development.

A Typical Day:

• Drive the product analytics roadmap, prioritization, and delivery of solutions in the Strategic Planning & Operations space, operating with minimal direction and planning up to 6 months ahead.
• Lead projects end-to-end: building timelines, defining key milestones, providing regular updates to product managers and analytics leadership, and delivering against agreed timelines.
• Work closely with Product Managers and Business leads to design, execute, and evaluate A/B tests; proactively identify and communicate common pitfalls and caveats of experimentation.
• Build credibility and trust with the team by building high-quality ground truth datasets and dashboards that empower stakeholders to answer data questions quickly and independently.
• Collaborate with Product Engineering to spec out logging and with Analytics Engineering to build scalable data tools for mass consumption within Airbnb.
• Devise business metric frameworks and optimization models to support Airbnb's product, operations, and policy decisions at scale.
• Influence data-driven decisions across global sites and business verticals via business reviews, self-serve portals, planning scorecards, and impact analyses.
• Experiment with new Airbnb policy/product features to help deter and mitigate risk; translate findings into actionable recommendations for leadership.
• Lead and influence machine learning model development in partnership with DS/Engineering teams to automate policy enforcement decisions, while routing the most complex cases for manual review.
• Proactively identify opportunities to apply AI-assisted tools (e.g., LLMs, AutoML, NLP pipelines) to accelerate analytical delivery and unlock new analytical capabilities.
• Ensure the availability of data quality and integrity for analysis and reporting by blending external and internal data sources, working closely with global operations and India analytics functions.

Your Expertise:

• 8+ years of industry experience with an advanced degree (Master's or PhD is a plus) in a quantitative field (e.g., Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, Data Science, Operations Research).
• Expert-level SQL; complex query optimization, performance tuning, and schema design; strong understanding of ETL/ELT pipelines; working knowledge of data transformation tools.
• Programming & Statistical Modeling: Advanced proficiency in Python (pandas, numpy, scikit-learn, statsmodels); ability to build and deploy end-to-end analytical models; experience with advanced regression techniques, time-series analysis, and causal inference.
• Experimentation & Analytical Frameworks: Expert-level A/B testing and multivariate testing; advanced experiment design including power analysis, switchback testing, and quasi-experimental methods (diff-in-diff, regression discontinuity); digital funnel and cohort analysis.
• Machine Learning & AI (Proficient): Proficiency in ML techniques including EDA, hypothesis testing, linear/logistic regression, SVM, ridge/lasso regression, random forest, NLP, KNN, and K-means; hands-on experience with LLMs (e.g., ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude) and applied prompt engineering; ability to independently deploy AI tools to solve analytical problems; awareness of responsible AI, data privacy (GDPR/CCPA), and bias mitigation.
• Experience with forecasting and advanced econometric modeling is a requirement.
• Visualization & Storytelling: Advanced proficiency in Tableau, Power BI, or equivalent BI platforms; ability to design and build executive-level dashboards and self-serve analytics portals; strong data storytelling and presentation skills for senior leadership audiences.
• Data Foundations: Strong working knowledge of Presto, Hive, Teradata, and Spark; experience designing scalable data models for analytical consumption.
• AI tool proficiency: Independently applies AI tools (LLMs, AutoML, NLP pipelines) to solve complex business problems.
• Designs and implements AI-enhanced analytical workflows that can be adopted team-wide.
• Evaluates and selects appropriate AI models for specific use cases; understands trade-offs between model complexity, interpretability, and performance.
• Champions responsible AI principles including bias detection, model fairness, and compliance with data privacy regulations (GDPR/CCPA).
• Contributes to AI-first culture by sharing best practices, running enablement sessions, and identifying new AI use cases.
• Proven ability to lead and influence cross-functional teams and senior stakeholders in a cross-cultural environment without direct authority.
• Exceptional communication skills; able to translate complex analytical findings into clear, actionable narratives for both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Proven track record of delivering full-stack data projects from inception to measurable business impact.
• Strong mentoring and coaching skills; demonstrated ability to develop junior talent.
• Positive, solution-oriented mindset with the ability to maintain confidentiality and objectivity.
• Exceptional problem-solving abilities, self-motivation, and autonomy; strong organizational and time management skills with the ability to manage multiple high-priority workstreams and meet deadlines.
• Proficiency in agile project management practices and tools (e.g., Jira/Asana).

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.

Please note, this role is based in Gurugram, India and relocation is not offered at this time.