Senior Staff Software Engineer, Trust

Airbnb; United States; Remote; USD 248,000 - 310,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Bonus

Equity

Employee Travel Credits

Job summary

Airbnb seeks a senior technical individual contributor to lead the Trust Platform roadmap and deliver scalable, high-quality fraud and safety decisions. You will write code, mentor engineers, and collaborate with product, data science, and ML teams to strengthen trust across the platform.

The role emphasizes an AI-first approach, distributed systems expertise, and lasting impact on global safety and reliability.

Qualifications

• 12+ years of backend & platform engineering with mission-critical distributed systems.
• Advanced degree or equivalent experience in computer science.
• Proven ability to guide multi-year roadmaps across sub-teams and prototype ideas.
• Exceptional communication with executives and cross-functional leads.
• Obsessed with reliability: SLOs, incident response, chaos testing.
• Hands-on with modern languages (Kotlin/Java/Scala) and AI-assisted workflows.
• Experience building developer experience and self-service tooling.

Responsibilities

• Define and execute the long-term vision and strategy for the Trust Platform, driving architectural direction for scalable fraud, safety, and trust decisions.
• Dive deep into Trust Platform components, build tooling, and improve quality and developer delight.
• Champion AI-first engineering with LLM-powered code generation while solving problems and ensuring quality.
• Partner with product, design, data science, and ML teams to define and drive platform capabilities and business impact.
• Lead and mentor engineers across teams, raising the technical bar across the trust engineering ecosystem.

Skills

Backend engineering

Distributed systems

Roadmaps

Communication

Reliability & observability

Kotlin/Java/Scala

AI-assisted development

DX & tooling

Trust & Risk domain

Education

BS/MS/PhD 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.

Your Location:

This position is US - Remote Eligible. The role may include occasional work at an Airbnb office or attendance at offsites, as agreed to with your manager. While the position is Remote Eligible, you must live in a state where Airbnb, Inc. has a registered entity. If your position is employed by another Airbnb entity, your recruiter will inform you what states you are eligible to work from.

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.

Pay Range

$248,000 — $310,000 USD

Reasonable Accommodations:

We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations throughout the recruitment process for applicants with disabilities. If you need assistance, or an accommodation, please let your recruiter know once you are contacted about a role.