Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Trust

Airbnb; United States; On-site; USD 150,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

Airbnb is seeking a Senior Machine Learning Engineer on the Trust Frontier AI team. You will contribute code and ideas to build next-gen AI systems protecting millions of users and communities.

You will own ML projects end-to-end—from framing ambiguous problems to training, deployment, and proving impact on core metrics with cross-functional teams. Work spans abuse detection, autonomous AI agents, and evaluation benchmarks.

Qualifications

• 5-10 years of industry experience in applied machine learning, with production experience.
• 1-2+ years hands-on experience with LLMs and GenAI technologies, including agentic frameworks and evaluation.
• Strong Python programming skills (required) and familiarity with Scala, Java, or equivalent.

Responsibilities

• Frame and prototype ML and agentic solutions for problems with no established approach, with product managers and frontline teams.
• Design, build, and productionize end-to-end ML pipelines for batch and real-time use cases.
• Build and improve abuse detection and trust-related models across defenses.
• Develop AI agents that automate trust decisions, including orchestration and guardrails for quality.
• Create benchmarks and instrumentation to measure model and agent decisions objectively.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to ship reliable ML features and systems.

Skills

Python

LLMs

GenAI

Agentic frameworks

Tools

Orchestration

Job description

Airbnb was born in 2007 when two hosts welcomed three guests to their San Francisco home, and has since grown to over 5 million hosts who have welcomed over 2 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 Community You Will Join:

Everyone at Airbnb thinks about trust, but our team obsesses over it daily. At the core of trust is safety, and thus we spend a significant amount of our time and energy keeping the community safe. The Trust team is responsible for developing the technology that helps protect our community and platform from fraud while also ensuring our hosts, guests, homes, and experiences meet our high standards. We constantly work to fight against online fraud (such as monetary loss, compromised accounts, spam and scam in messages, fake inventory, etc.) as well as offline fraud (theft, property damage, personal safety, etc.). We also work on onboarding and screening of users, and think about complex topics like identity and reputation to ensure that every interaction with Airbnb helps build trust in us and our community.

The Trust Frontier AI team is where new AI technology for Trust gets invented and proven. We build specialized models for mission-critical trust and safety problems, develop the AI agents and agentic capabilities that automate trust decisions, and create the benchmarks and evaluation harnesses that keep decision quality high as those agents take on more autonomy. We work on problems before the answer is known - prototyping, experimenting, and iterating with our partner teams until a solution proves itself against real business and top line metrics.

You’ll work side-by-side with talented product managers, data scientists, software engineers, fraud intelligence, and operations teams. Together, you'll design and build ML solutions that have direct, meaningful impact on user trust, business success, and the global Airbnb community.

The Difference You Will Make:

As a Senior Machine Learning Engineer on the Trust Frontier AI team, you will actively contribute code and ideas that shape the next generation of AI systems protecting millions of Airbnb users. You’ll own and deliver ML projects end-to-end, from framing an ambiguous problem and prototyping a solution, to training and productionizing models, to proving impact on top line metrics with front line teams.

You’ll work on abuse behavior detection that spans multiple defenses, on AI agents that make trust decisions autonomously, and on the evaluation and benchmarking work that makes those decisions trustworthy. Much of this work is early: you will help decide what to build, not only how to build it, and you'll see it through to measurable impact on the platform.

A Typical Day:

• Frame and prototype ML and agentic solutions for problems that do not yet have an established approach, in partnership with product managers, data scientists, and front line defense teams.
• Design, build, and productionize end-to-end Machine Learning pipelines - including feature engineering, model training, evaluation, and deployment - for both batch and real-time use cases.
• Build and improve abuse behavior detection that generalizes across defenses.
• Design, launch, and iterate on AI agents that automate trust decisions, including orchestration, tool interfaces, and the guardrails that hold quality steady as autonomy increases.
• Build benchmarks, evaluation harnesses, and instrumentation that let us measure agentic and model decision quality objectively, and use them to drive real improvements.
• Develop specialized models for trust and safety use cases, and use LLMs and AI agents to accelerate how we build models.
• Write, review, and ship clean, testable code - whether training a new model, improving an existing pipeline, or optimizing a feature for scalability and reliability.
• Work with large-scale structured and unstructured data to continuously improve ML models for Airbnb product, business, and operational use cases.
• Partner with front line defense teams to validate solutions through experiments and holdouts, and quantify their impact on business and operational metrics.
• Participate in code reviews, design discussions, and cross-team collaborations to contribute to a high-quality ML engineering culture.

Your Expertise:

• 5-10 years of industry experience in applied Machine Learning, with a track record of building and productionizing models at scale.
• 1-2+ years of hands-on experience with LLMs and GenAI technologies, including building with agentic frameworks, orchestration, and evaluation.
• Strong programming skills in Python (required) and familiarity with Scala, Java, or equivalent. Solid understanding of Machine Learning best practices - e.g., training/serving skew minimization, A/B testing, feature engineering, model selection - and algorithms such as gradient boosted trees, n