# Scaling Airbnb's identity graph with a unified knowledge graph infrastructure

DevFeed: [Scaling Airbnb's identity graph with a unified knowledge graph infrastructure](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/scaling-airbnb-s-identity-graph-with-a-unified-knowledge-graph-infrastructure-1221.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering/scaling-airbnbs-identity-graph-with-a-unified-knowledge-graph-infrastructure-ebac467b7836?source=rss----53c7c27702d5---4>)

Author: Lucen Zhao

Published: 2026-05-19T17:01:01Z

Content type: article

Language: en

Sources: [The Airbnb Tech Blog - Medium](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/the-airbnb-tech-blog-medium.md>)

Topics: [Graphs](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/graphs.md>), [graph-database](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/graph-database.md>), [Architecture & Design](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/architecture-design.md>), [Scalability](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/scalability.md>), [Caching](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/caching.md>), [Low Latency](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/low-latency.md>), [real-time](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/real-time.md>), [data](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/data.md>)

Tags: [architecture](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/architecture.md>), [caching](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/caching.md>), [data](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/data.md>), [engineering](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/engineering.md>), [graph-database](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/graph-database.md>), [infrastructure](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/infrastructure.md>), [knowledge-graph](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/knowledge-graph.md>), [latency](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/latency.md>), [low-latency](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/low-latency.md>), [safety](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/safety.md>), [scalability](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/scalability.md>), [technology](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/technology.md>)

## AI overview

Airbnb describes scaling its identity graph into a unified, internally managed knowledge graph infrastructure. The article covers the graph database and KV caching storage layer, graph service, near-real-time ingestion, low-latency access, and architectural evolution driven by increasing graph density and query complexity.

## Source excerpt

How Airbnb shifts from PaaS to an internal knowledge graph infrastructure at scale. By: Lucen Zhao, Shukun Yang, Ashish Jain Knowledge graphs offer a natural and powerful way to represent relationships between entities. Many real-world systems are fundamentally about connections. Airbnb's identity graph captures relationships between users in a graph database. The identity graph serves aggregated insights that enable user identity resolution and relationship understanding. These capabilities support a wide range of Trust and Safety use cases, from detecting suspicious activities to identifying linked accounts. Over time, the identity graph has grown into one of the largest and most complex graph data products at Airbnb, both in terms of scale and the complexity of queries it supports. In 2024, Airbnb began investing in a new, internally managed, paved-path graph data platform to build a unified knowledge graph infrastructure. Airbnb's identity graph became one of the first systems to adopt this platform. In this post, we'll walk through the foundations and challenges of the identity graph, introduce the architecture behind the graph infrastructure, and highlight several key optimizations that emerged during the onboarding process. Airbnb's identity graph Airbnb's identity graph is a critical foundation layer, playing an important role in Trust and Safety applications. It contains two major components: Graph data storage: a storage layer composed of a graph database and a key-value (KV) caching layer. It models users and relationships as vertices and edges. Most data is ingested in near real-time through asynchronous events and served through low-latency, real-time service calls. Graph service: this service provides a unified interface for accessing graph data. It retrieves data from underlying sources, including the graph database, applies aggregation logic or models as needed, and serves the results to downstream customer services. Evolution of the identity graph a