Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Payments

Details

Airbnb’s Payments modeling team develops intelligence and personalization solutions to optimize the company’s global transaction volume, collect payments from guests, distribute payouts to hosts, and prevent fraudulent transactions.

Responsibilities

• Spearhead LLM agents, real-time anomaly detectors, and other AI/ML solutions that solve real-world problems.
• Collaborate with product, engineering, operations, and data science teams to identify high-leverage opportunities, refine AI/ML requirements, make architecture decisions, and measure business value with data-driven metrics.
• Design, train, deploy, and operate large-scale AI applications for batch and streaming workloads.
• Ensure low latency, high reliability, and continuous improvement through automated monitoring and retraining loops.
• Architect and own end-to-end solutions at global scale.
• Establish technical standards for model governance, continuous learning, and engineering excellence.
• Mentor and inspire teammates while fostering an experimentation-driven environment that connects research with production excellence.

Requirements

• 5+ years of industry experience in applied AI/ML, including an MS or PhD in a relevant field.
• Strong programming and data engineering skills, including Python or Java.
• Proven expertise in modern AI/LLM workflows, including prompt engineering, fine-tuning with LoRA and RLHF, hallucination mitigation, safety guardrails, and online/offline testing to minimize training and inference drift.
• Hands-on experience with at least three of the following:
  • PyTorch or TensorFlow
  • Scalable inference stacks
  • Vector search
  • Orchestration and MLOps platforms such as Kubeflow and Airflow
  • Large-scale data streaming and processing with Spark, Ray, or Kafka
• Experience designing, deploying, and monitoring production AI systems, such as personalization engines or generative content services.
• Experience with drift, cost, and latency monitoring, automated retraining triggers, and translating ambiguous business needs into measurable AI impact.
• Prior knowledge of AI/ML applications in the payments domain is highly desirable.

Location

This position is eligible for remote work in the United States. The role may include occasional work at an Airbnb office or attendance at offsites, as agreed with the manager. Employees must live in a state where Airbnb, Inc. has a registered entity.

Compensation and Benefits

The base pay range is $191,000–$223,000 USD. The role may also be eligible for bonus, equity, benefits, and Employee Travel Credits. The actual base pay depends on factors including training, transferable skills, work experience, business needs, and market demands.

Inclusion and Accessibility

Airbnb is committed to working with the broadest talent pool possible and encourages all qualified individuals to apply. The company provides a disability-inclusive application and interview process and offers reasonable accommodation support.