Airbnb has 20 job openings | Hacker News Reader

Airbnb has 20 job openings

airbnb.com

90 pointsbrianchesky34 comments

Heh. When I first read "SEM Specialist", my first thought was "why does Airbnb want to hire someone who knows Scanning Electron Microscopy"?

You need to hire Jenny Ersbak. She's done three interviews with you so far and I can only say praises about her (and I'm her boss). Email me if you'd like a reference.

Would they hire the right candidate if he did not want to relocate to SF?

Customer Service Jobs can be offsite. Everything else is onsite in SF.

On the other hand, I wonder if they will interview someone wanting to relocate to SF from out of state.

We will absolutely interview you from out of state if you're willing to relocate. About 1/2 of Airbnb employees moved to SF for the job.

Or country.

Sure thing!

Are you looking for people with lots of experience for the engineering positions or will you consider graduates?

We are interested in both recent grads and veterans, as long as you are smart, fun to be around, and passionate about Airbnb. I think a well balanced team should have people with different levels of experience.

H1B Sponsor?

Yes, we will sponsor an H1B if we make an offer to a candidate.

Any idea how much funding these guys got? They seem to be doing well.

They were interviewed by Mixergy and Jessica Livingston recently and there's a LOT of great stuff in those interviews:

http://mixergy.com/airbnb-chesky-gebbia/

http://ycombinator.posterous.com/airbnb-and-weebly-interview...

Holy cow, they're good storytellers and it is packed with useful detail.

As far as I can tell, they're only YC funded. They have steadily growing revenue (given the assumption that more people are booking lodging through their site)

They also were funded by Sequoia Capital last year.

http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2009/10/25/sequoia-capit...

Out of curiosity, why do they only list YC in their quick facts (bottom left of page)?

We scaled a rate that took us all by surprise. Obviously, some things are less important than others and we had to prioritize. We're getting around to updating the peripheral pages soon.

The Airbnb team is a talented group of engineers and designers. I had the opportunity to stay with them during Startup School last October and observe their work environment over the course of a few days. These guys are focused on their product and determined, good luck on the hiring! //from Texas

I'd like to know how they chose the quantity for each slot--how did they know "we need X this, Y that, and Z these"? Is there a template for this somewhere? :-) Obviously not--but what was the process like?

Perhaps a small datapoint suggesting an economic recovery?

The way that I understand Airbnb's business is that they're providing an "inferior good" at least when compared to a hotel room (this is not a slight on their business). Inferior goods usually do well in poor economies (if I remember correctly, Hormel was doing really well with Spam just after the recession hit).

So the fact that Airbnb is doing well probably may not be indicative of a positive trend for the economy.

Then again, one company's success or failure rarely has much to do with the economy anyway.

My guess is that people go to AirBnB for the experience of meeting people, staying in an authentic locale, etc. It seems like a new disruptive product (which would also make it "inferior" to standard hotels).

Personal anecdote I know, but I used AirBnB to stay in Paris last month - it was all about price.

Will they accept resumes from outside the US? Im just finishing my software engineering post-grad in Ireland, would love to work in a startup like Airbnb.

Yes, we are happy to interview talented candidates from abroad.

I always knew this was a good idea. This just shows it. and Couch surfing sort of backed it up. Im glad to see that this is really taking off. Maybe hotels could start charging less. I imagine they could be seeing a extremely small decline in their revenue.

Fun job, looks technically interesting, great benefits, growing fast (used to have 8 openings, now 20), I wish I was done with college so I could apply. Looks like a no brainer.

irony:

If others have ever noted that you're borderline perfectionistic, this is the job for you!

(on the customer service job posting)

Customer Service posting: "Must be a college graduate." Hmm. A lot of engineers I know wouldn't qualify for customer service at AirBnB.

Most "rules" in life are suggestions of varying strengths. Screening for "college graduate" is just a way of asking for a baseline level of education and polish. If you can demonstrate that in another way, you'll be totally fine -- it may take more effort to prove this without a diploma, but it's totally possible.

The CTO of EMC is an IBM Fellow... and has a B.S. in Finance from Marist College.

I noticed the bi/multilingual requirements for i'natl customer service -- any preferred languages there?

i guess they didn't like my resume. ;(

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