Most engineers
apply to Airbnb.
I've been building
here for
20 months.
Now I want to
own it full-time.
Hi, I'm Sai Likhith — Sr. Software Engineer embedded at Airbnb since September 2024. I build GenAI infrastructure and data labeling platformsthat 55 analysts depend on every day. 8+ years turning model demos into production systems. Ready to go full-time.
7 years running
ProfileEntire ML engineer hosted by Sai Likhith
8+ years experience · GenAI · ML Infrastructure · Data Pipelines ·show more
What this engineer offers
- LLM orchestration (30+ models)
- Data labeling platforms
- PII de-identification (Presidio)
- Airflow / Hive / Trino pipelines
- AWS · Docker · Kubernetes
- OpenTelemetry · Datadog
What colleagues say
He doesn't just deliver — he continuously looks for ways to make things better.
Sai has been an outstanding partner in the deployment of the BPIVA tool, and I want to take a moment to recognize his incredible contributions. Thanks to Sai's efforts, the BPIVA tool has had a significant impact on reducing non-value-added work, enabling the BPI team to shift their focus to high-impact, actionable tasks exactly where their energy should be. What truly sets Sai apart is his deep understanding of technology combined with his ability to quickly grasp tool requirements and translate them into real solutions. He doesn't just deliver, he continuously looks for ways to enhance and upgrade the tool's capabilities, ensuring it evolves alongside our team's needs. None of this would have been possible without Sai's dedication and expertise. He is a truly great partner who consistently goes above and beyond to deliver excellence. Thank you, Sai, for everything you do! 🙌
Ameet Shinde
Senior Manager, BPI · Airbnb
Recently stayed at.
Four engagements over the last 5 years. Tap any to read the full case study — what was broken, what I built, what changed.
I'm the engineer your ML team calls when the demo worked once and now production is on fire.
My day-to-day at Airbnb is the unglamorous half of AI: batching, retries, token-lifetime checks, traceable logging, PII detection that doesn't false-positive on the word "John."
I've spent 8 years migrating between stacks — Java at Oracle, PySpark at Shell, Kafka at Southwest, Spring Boot & Kubernetes at Eli Lilly, and now Python / Streamlit / Flask / Airflow at Airbnb. What persists is a taste for systems that fail gracefully, observe themselves, and don't wake humans at 3 AM.
Outside of work I write about LLM eval tooling and contribute to the Microsoft Presidio ecosystem.
30+ LLMs, one interface
Built Airbnb's BPI Virtual Analyst — analysts pick model, paste data, click run. Provider lock-in becomes a config flag.
17× scale on workflows
Refactored the analysis pipeline from 600 rows to 10,000 per run. Same hardware, batching & chunked uploads.
PII detection, 30% faster
Microsoft Presidio with entity-targeted detection cut runtime by ~30% on the de-identification pipeline.
A tour through five stacks.
Five companies, four industries, one common thread: production-grade systems that data scientists trust.
- 2024 — NowContractAirbnb · San Francisco
Sr. Data Scientist · ML Infrastructure
GenAI tooling, Labelbox workflows, PII pipelines, Airflow. 30+ LLMs, 55+ analysts, 10K rows/run.
- 20247 mosEli Lilly · Philadelphia
Sr. Data Scientist
Dose order management for radiopharmaceuticals on KUBED. Spring Boot, React, Temporal, Istio. 99.9% uptime.
- 2023 — 241 yr 8 mosSouthwest Airlines · Dallas
Data Scientist · Senior App Engineer
Kafka streams for real-time flight tracking. RabbitMQ microservices. 95% test coverage via Gradle / Java port.
- 2021 — 221 yr 11 mosShell PLC · Houston
Python Developer · Data Scientist
NLP text-classification for drilling-loss events. CNN autoencoders for acoustic impedance. Responsible-AI POC with LIME / SHAP.
- 2017 — 192 yrsOracle India · Bangalore
Python Developer · Data Scientist
Cloud HCM integrations, 50K+ LOC. ERP analytics for 13 business units. ELK + Kinesis fraud-detection POCs.
The stackI've shipped with.
Tools I'd reach for tomorrow, ordered by how often they ship in production at my last 5 jobs.
I already work here.
I'd like to stay.
I joined Airbnb in September 2024 as a contractor on ML Infrastructure. Since then I've shipped the BPI Virtual Analyst (now the daily tool for 55+ business analysts), 17× the throughput on the analysis pipeline, and a PII pipeline that's30% fasterthan what we had. I know the codebase, the review style, the on-call rotations, and the way Airbnb writes tests. I'd love to keep building here as a full-time member of the team.