Senior Staff Software Engineer, Trust

Airbnb

7h•$248,000 - $310,000•Remote

About The Position

Airbnb was founded in 2007 and has grown to over 5 million hosts and 2 billion guest arrivals globally, connecting people with communities authentically. The Trust team at Airbnb is dedicated to ensuring the safety and security of the community and platform. They develop technology to protect against online fraud (monetary loss, compromised accounts, spam, fake inventory) and offline fraud (theft, property damage, personal safety). The team also handles user onboarding, screening, identity, and reputation management to build trust in Airbnb and its community. Trust Engineering is responsible for the technology vision and development of a complex stack that impacts every key interaction on the platform. As a senior technical individual contributor, you will collaborate closely with leaders across the technical organization to design, execute, and deliver a complex and collaborative roadmap of Trust engineering efforts, requiring cross-organizational collaboration. Despite being at a high level of seniority, all individual contributors at Airbnb are expected to be hands-on and contribute code.

Requirements

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).

Nice To Haves

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.

Responsibilities

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.