Community Support Forecasting and Demand Planning Analyst

About Airbnb

Airbnb began in 2007, when two hosts opened their San Francisco home to three guests. Since then, the platform has expanded to more than 5 million hosts and over 2 billion guest arrivals across nearly every country. Its community helps travelers connect with local places and experiences in a more personal way.

Team Overview

The Community Support organization manages tens of millions of customer interactions each year through phone, messaging, chat, and social channels. It addresses a broad set of issues, including cancellations, account problems, refunds, payments, reservations, extenuating circumstances, booking and listing concerns, safety matters, and claims. The team operates globally through offices in San Francisco, Dublin, Montreal, Seattle, Singapore, Manila, Gurgaon, and an extensive partner network that supports every region.

Role Summary

Airbnb is seeking an experienced Forecasting and Demand Planning Analyst to support the Community Support team. This role owns demand forecasting and long-range planning for multi-channel contact center operations within Global Operations. The goal is to ensure the business has the right capacity, skills, and timing to meet service targets while balancing productivity and cost.

The position blends planning, advanced analytics, and cross-functional partnership to help drive scalable, data-informed workforce decisions in a fast-moving environment.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead short-, medium-, and long-range demand forecasts across Global Operations channels such as phone, messaging, email, and back-office work.
• Create, improve, and maintain forecasting models grounded in statistics and machine learning, including approaches such as exponential smoothing, ARIMA, and regression-based methods.
• Analyze trends, seasonality, and variance patterns, and identify breaks in structure, unusual values, and demand spikes or drops.
• Measure forecast uncertainty using confidence ranges, error distributions, and bias assessments.
• Build scenarios for peak seasons, product releases, growth initiatives, and unexpected demand events.
• Track model quality through accuracy measures such as MAPE, RMSE, MAE, and bias.
• Set governance practices for models, including documentation, validation, back-testing, and post-event review.
• Explore and apply new forecasting and optimization methods as business requirements change.
• Run scenario and sensitivity analyses to understand the trade-offs among service levels, cost, and utilization.
• Work with Analytics and Data Engineering to design scalable planning pipelines, dashboards, and automated forecasting and capacity models.
• Use SQL and Python to pull, transform, and study large operational datasets to monitor forecast quality, capacity gaps, utilization, and business risk.
• Communicate assumptions, methods, risks, trade-offs, and recommendations in executive-ready formats.
• Advise senior leaders and contribute to demand and capacity planning discussions in cross-functional settings.
• Partner with Delivery, Product, Finance, HR, and other teams to integrate planning outputs into operational decisions.
• Identify opportunities to improve processes, increase automation, and adopt best practices that reduce cost while protecting or improving customer experience and service levels.

Experience and Qualifications

• More than 10 years of experience in demand forecasting, capacity planning, workforce analytics, or applied analytics.
• A bachelor’s degree in Mathematics, Statistics, Operations Research, Engineering, Economics, Data Science, or another quantitative discipline.
• Strong understanding of probability, statistics, and optimization.
• Practical experience with forecasting methods, including time series analysis, exponential smoothing, ARIMA, regression, and hypothesis testing, as well as capacity modeling using Erlang, queueing theory, service-level, and utilization models.
• Good knowledge of contact center metrics such as AHT, ASA, service level, shrinkage, and occupancy; experience with large-scale, multi-site, or global contact center environments is preferred.
• Advanced capability in Excel, Google Sheets, SQL, Python, and visualization tools such as Tableau.
• Exposure to workforce management tools like NICE, Verint, or Aspect, or planning platforms such as Anaplan, is preferred.
• Strong commercial judgment with the ability to balance efficiency and customer experience.
• Excellent communication, executive presentation, and stakeholder influence skills, with the ability to explain complex analytics to non-technical audiences.
• Comfort working in ambiguous, fast-paced, and highly dynamic environments.

Location

This position is remote-eligible within the United States. It may occasionally require work from an Airbnb office or attendance at offsites, as agreed with the manager. Candidates must live in a state where Airbnb, Inc. has a registered entity; some states are excluded, and the list may change over time. If the role is employed by another Airbnb entity, the recruiter will confirm which states are eligible.

Inclusion and Accessibility

Airbnb encourages applications from a wide range of candidates and values diverse perspectives as a driver of innovation and better outcomes. The company also provides an inclusive application and interview process for candidates who need disability-related accommodations. Accommodation requests should be sent only if a disability prevents completion of the online application, and the request should include the candidate’s full name, the role title, and the specific support needed.

Compensation and Benefits

The listed base salary range for this role is $168,000 to $210,000 USD. Actual pay may vary depending on training, transferable skills, work history, business needs, and market conditions, and the range may be updated in the future. This position may also be eligible for bonus, equity, benefits, and Employee Travel Credits.