Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Payments

Airbnb

5d•$191,000 - $223,000•Remote

About The Position

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 Payments org at Airbnb is responsible for everything related to settling money in Airbnb’s global marketplace and makes the Payment experience as delightful, magical, intuitive, and easy as possible. At the Payments modeling team, our goal is to empower the mission by introducing intelligences and personalizations that optimize Airbnb’s massive daily transaction volume to best collect payments from guests, distribute payouts to hosts while preventing fraudulent transactions from happening.

Requirements

5+ years of industry experience in applied AI/ML, inclusive MS or PhD in relevant fields.
Strong programming (Python/Java) and data engineering skills.
Proven mastery of modern AI/LLM workflows — prompt engineering, fine tuning (LoRA, RLHF), hallucination mitigation, safety guardrails, and rigorous online/offline testing to minimize training/inference drift and ensure reliable outcomes.
Handson experience with at least three of the following: PyTorch/TensorFlow , scalable inference stacks, vector search, orchestration/MLOps platforms (Kubeflow, Airflow), largescale data streaming & processing (Spark, Ray, Kafka)
Demonstrated success designing, deploying, and monitoring production AI systems - e.g. personalization engines, generative content services - complete with drift/cost/latency monitoring, automated retraining triggers, and cross-functional collaboration that translates ambiguous business needs into measurable AI impact.

Nice To Haves

Prior knowledge of AI/ML Applications in the Payments domain is highly desirable

Responsibilities

Spearhead LLM agents, realtime anomaly detectors, and other breakthrough solutions that solve real-world problems and create product magic.
Collaborate with product, engineering, ops, and data science to spot high leverage opportunities, refine AI/ML requirements, make principled architecture choices, and measure business value with clear, data-driven metrics.
Design, train, deploy, and operate large-scale AI applications for both batch and streaming workloads, ensuring low latency, high reliability, and continuous improvement via automated monitoring and retraining loops.
Mentor and inspire teammates, fostering a collaborative, experimentation-driven environment where cutting edge research meets production excellence and every engineer is empowered to push AI boundaries at Airbnb.