Senior Risk Tools & Automation Lead

Details

The Payments Risk Operations team protects Airbnb’s guests, hosts, and platform from fraud, financial loss, and abuse. This role owns the end-to-end agent experience for risk and fraud operations, defining investigator needs, conceptualizing the next generation of the risk workbench, and driving automation through process efficiencies and AI.

The role partners with Platform, Engineering, Data Science, Design, Legal, Compliance, Finance, Training, Quality, and Workforce Management to reduce manual effort, shorten handle times, improve decision quality, and support complex investigations.

Responsibilities

Agent Experience

• Own the end-to-end agent experience across risk and fraud investigation workflows, from case intake through decision, documentation, and quality review.
• Observe agent workflows, map pain points, and quantify friction related to handle time, clicks, context switching, and error rates.
• Establish feedback loops through surveys, office hours, champion networks, and ticket intake.
• Partner with Training, Quality, and Workforce Management to support enablement, documentation, and adoption tracking.

Tooling Requirements and Improvements

• Translate operational needs into business requirements, user stories, and acceptance criteria for Platform and Engineering teams.
• Own and manage the operational risk tooling roadmap and backlog.
• Lead intake, triage, and prioritization of tooling requests using impact sizing, including time saved, loss prevented, accuracy gained, and risk reduced.
• Drive user acceptance testing, launch readiness, and post-launch measurement for tooling releases.

Workbench Design and Conceptualization

• Define the long-term vision for a unified risk workbench that brings signals, account history, payment data, linked entities, and decisioning into a single workspace.
• Partner with Platform, Design, and UX Research on discovery, journey maps, wireframes, prototypes, and usability testing.
• Promote simplicity, consistency, and accessibility in risk tooling.

Automation and AI

• Identify, size, and prioritize automation opportunities across case routing, data gathering, enrichment, summarization, and low-risk decisioning.
• Partner with Platform, Engineering, and Data Science to design and deploy AI-assisted capabilities such as case summaries, recommended actions, agent copilots, and automated documentation.
• Define human-in-the-loop guardrails, quality controls, and monitoring to preserve accuracy, fairness, and compliance.
• Build business cases connecting automation initiatives to measurable outcomes and report progress to senior leadership.

Cross-Functional Leadership

• Serve as the primary operations policy partner to Platform, Engineering, Data Science, Design, Policy, Legal, Compliance, and Finance.
• Influence without authority and align technical and non-technical stakeholders on priorities, tradeoffs, and timelines.
• Communicate roadmaps, launches, and impact to audiences ranging from frontline agents to executive leadership.

Requirements

• 10+ years of experience in operations, program management, or product management.
• 5+ years of experience in fraud, payment risk, trust and safety, or a related investigations industry.
• Bachelor’s degree required; Master’s degree preferred.
• Proven experience writing business requirements, user stories, and acceptance criteria that led to shipped tools with measurable impact.
• Familiarity with user experience testing and design, including discovery interviews, journey mapping, usability testing, wireframes, and prototypes.
• Demonstrated success collaborating with Engineering, Data Science, Platform, Operations, Legal, Compliance, and Finance teams.
• Experience identifying and delivering automation or process-efficiency improvements at scale.
• Strong analytical skills and experience using data to size opportunities, build business cases, and measure outcomes; SQL or similar skills are a plus.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to simplify complex technical and operational concepts for executive audiences.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience designing or launching agent workbenches, case management systems, or investigation consoles.
• Experience applying generative AI or large language models in operational settings, including agent copilots, case summarization, or automated decision support.
• Working knowledge of payment fraud, chargebacks, account takeover, identity verification, or AML.
• Familiarity with workflow and automation platforms, including rules engines, RPA, or low-code tools, and with agile delivery practices.
• Experience leading change management and adoption across large, globally distributed operations teams.
• Experience working at an e-commerce, travel, fintech, or payments company.

Compensation

The India annual base pay range is ₹3,780,000–₹5,400,000 INR. The range is inclusive of allowances and may change based on factors including training, transferable skills, work experience, business needs, and market demands. The role may also be eligible for bonuses or incentives, equity programs, benefits, and Employee Travel Credits.

Airbnb provides reasonable accommodations throughout the recruitment process for applicants with disabilities.