Staff Software Engineer, Fraud Prevention & Safety

Airbnb was born in 2007 when two Hosts welcomed three guests to their San Francisco home, and has since grown to over 4 million Hosts who have welcomed more than 1 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 Fraud prevention & Safety team is responsible for detecting and mitigating fraud and safety issues while 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. Fraud prevention & Safety is responsible for the technology vision and development of risk detection and mitigation across the user journey on Airbnb.

The Difference You Will Make:

As a Staff Software Engineer, you will partner closely with our senior leaders across the broader technical organization. You will be deeply involved in building highly available and real-time risk detection services in close collaboration with product, data science and operations teams to understand ever evolving attack vectors and to make Airbnb the most safe and trusted community. All individual contributors at Airbnb are Software Engineers which means we expect you to be hands on and contribute code.

A Typical Day: 

• Design, implement, and operate resilient and scalable distributed systems
• Work collaboratively with cross-functional partners including software engineers, product managers, operations and data scientists, identify opportunities for business impact, understand, refine, and prioritize requirements for machine learning models, drive engineering decisions, and quantify impact.
• Work closely with trust defense and platform teams to tackle the changing landscape of fraud attacks.
• Provide critical input in the Trust team’s roadmap and technical direction.
• Identify opportunities to improve the reliability, scalability, efficiency, and efficacy of our defenses and drive their implementation.
• Mentor other engineers in developing their technical and collaboration skills
• Advocate and participate in efforts to advance Airbnb’s engineering processes and technical foundations.
• Hands-on develop, productionize, and operate Machine Learning models and pipelines at scale, including both batch and real-time use cases.

Your Expertise:

• 9+ years of industry engineering experience.
• BS/MS/PhD in Computer Science, a related field, or equivalent work experience
• Strong programming (Scala / Python / Java/ C++ or equivalent) and data engineering skills
• Hands on experience leading project teams and setting technical direction.
• Exposure to architectural patterns of a large, high-scale software applications (e.g., well-designed APIs, high volume data pipelines, efficient algorithms, models)
• Experience with test driven development, familiar with A/B testing, incremental delivery and deployment.
• Experience with the Trust and Risk domain is a plus.
• Experience with hands on machine learning model development 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. Click here for the up-to-date list of excluded states. This list is continuously evolving, so please check back with us if the state you live in is on the exclusion list. 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: reasonableaccommodations@airbnb.com. 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.