Senior Staff Software Engineer, Trust

airbnb, Inc.; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 150,000 - 200,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Bonus potential

Equity options

Employee Travel Credits

Job summary

Airbnb, Inc. is looking for a Senior Technical Individual Contributor to define and execute the long-term vision for the Trust Platform in San Francisco. With over 12 years of experience in backend and platform engineering, you will drive strategic architectural decisions and lead initiatives to enhance safety and reliability. Ideal candidates hold a BS, MS, or Ph.D. in computer science and possess exceptional communication and leadership skills. The role includes competitive compensation with potential bonuses, equity, and travel benefits.

Qualifications

• 12+ years of experience in designing and operating mission-critical distributed systems at scale.
• Ability to guide technical roadmaps and align long-term platform vision with execution.
• Exceptional communication skills with experience in cross-functional collaboration.

Responsibilities

• Define and execute the long-term vision and strategy for the Trust Platform.
• Partner with technical leaders and stakeholders on platform capabilities.
• Lead and mentor engineers, raising the technical bar within the trust engineering ecosystem.

Skills

Backend & platform engineering

Modern programming languages (Kotlin/Java/Scala)

Technical leadership

Reliability and observability

Collaboration with cross-functional teams

Experience in Trust and Risk domain

Education

BS, MS or Ph.D. in computer science or related field

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. Trust Engineering is responsible for the technology vision and development of a complex stack that runs on every key interaction on the platform.

The Difference You Will Make

As a senior technical individual contributor, you will partner closely with our leaders across the broader technical organization helping design, execute and deliver in a complex and collaborative roadmap of Trust engineering efforts that will require collaboration across many parts of the organization and many parts of Airbnb. Although you will be at one of our highest levels of seniority, all individual contributors at Airbnb are Software Engineers which means we expect you to be hands on and contribute code.

A Typical day

• Define and execute the long-term vision and strategy for the Trust Platform, driving the architectural direction for foundational systems that enable scalable, high-quality fraud, safety, and trust decisioning across Airbnb, and are broadly leveraged across tech organizations
• Dive deep into Trust Platform components, build system and performance tooling, and identify cross-cutting opportunities to elevate technical quality, operational excellence, and developer delight.
• Champion an AI-first engineering approach, using LLM-powered agents to generate and iterate on code while you focus on problem-solving, system design, and quality oversight.
• Partner with technical leaders, product managers, operations, data scientists, and Trust defense & ML teams to define and drive platform capabilities, tackle evolving fraud threats, and deliver measurable business impact
• Lead and mentor engineers across teams, raising the technical bar and developing the next generation of technical leaders within the trust engineering ecosystem.

Your Expertise

• 12+ years of backend & platform engineering designing, building, and operating mission-critical distributed systems at scale.
• BS, MS or Ph.D. in computer science or related field, or equivalent work experience
• Proven experience guiding multi-year technical roadmaps: aligning long-term platform vision with day-to-day execution across multiple sub-teams, prototyping to iterate on ideas, and influencing without relying on formal authority.
• Exceptional communication skills, equally effective white-boarding with senior ICs, partnering with cross-functional leads (Product, Design, Data Science), and presenting strategy to executives and the broader engineering community.
• Obsessed with reliability: deep experience building and improving observability, SLOs, incident response, and resilience patterns (circuit breakers, graceful degradation, chaos testing) to keep mission-critical systems running at the highest bar.
• Hands‑on with modern languages (e.g., Kotlin/Java/Scala) and comfortable evaluating and introducing new technologies including AI-assisted development workflows (LLMs, code generation).
• Experience building developer experience & tooling is a plus, with a mindset of treating internal developers as customers and championing self-service, documentation, and delightful DX.
• Experience in the Trust and Risk domain is a plus.

Our Commitment To Inclusion & Belonging

Airbnb is committed to working with the broadest talent pool possible. We believe diverse ideas foster innovation and engagement, and allow us to attract creatively‑led people, and to develop the best products, services and solutions. All qualified individuals are encouraged to apply.

We strive to also provide a disability inclusive application and interview process. If you are a candidate with a disability and require reasonable accommodation in order to submit an application, please contact us at: [e-mail] . Please include your full name, the role you’re applying for and the accommodation necessary to assist you with the recruiting process.

We ask that you only reach out to us if you are a candidate whose disability prevents you from being able to complete our online application.

How We’ll Take Care of You

Our job titles may span more than one career level. The actual base pay is dependent upon many factors, such as: training, transferable skills, work experience, business needs and market demands. The base pay range is subject to change and may be modified in the future. This role may also be eligible for bonus, equity, benefits, and Employee Travel Credits.