Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer - AI Safety And Guardrail

Details

You will join Airbnb's Community Support Products (CSP) Machine Learning team to design, build, and operate guardrails and AI-safety systems for AI-powered support experiences (chatbots, AI Assistants, Agent Copilot). The team works on LLM fine-tuning and optimization, RAG/Search, LLM evaluation and testing automation, feedback-based learning, and guardrail systems for production ML applications across Airbnb.

Responsibilities

• Collaborate with cross-functional teams (ML, engineering, product, policy, trust, security, legal, operations) to identify safety issues and evaluate risks across AI-driven CS products.
• Design and implement technical guardrails to mitigate risks such as hallucinations, privacy breaches, prompt injections, harmful responses, and bias.
• Build continuous risk-monitoring pipelines, alerting, and human-in-the-loop feedback systems to detect and mitigate model failure modes.
• Work with evaluation and data platforms to create data flywheels for fixing failure modes and improving guardrails.
• Partner with ML infrastructure teams to scale safety features and deploy robust ML services in production.
• Own documentation, guardrail white papers, onboarding materials, and auditability of safety controls.

Requirements

• PhD/Master’s degree in Computer Science or equivalent experience (preferred).
• 7+ years of experience developing and deploying machine learning models in production.
• Strong understanding of machine learning principles and algorithms.
• Hands-on programming experience in Python and in-depth knowledge of ML frameworks.
• Experience (2+ years) in one or more of: Content Safety/Integrity, ML Fairness & Bias, Responsible AI, or AI Model Security.
• Experience with LLM technologies and related tooling: LLM fine-tuning and optimization, RAG/Search, LLM evaluation and testing automation, feedback-based learning and guardrail techniques.
• Familiarity with LLM alignment techniques (SFT, RLHF, DPO) is a plus.
• Practical experience designing monitoring, observability, and alerting systems for ML-driven features.
• Ability to partner with product, design, trust & safety, and legal teams to meet global privacy and compliance requirements.

Location & Work Model

• This position is US - Remote Eligible. Candidates must live in a state where Airbnb, Inc. has a registered entity. The role may include occasional work at an Airbnb office or attendance at offsites as agreed with your manager.

Compensation & Benefits

• Base pay range: $244,000—$305,000 USD. This role may also be eligible for bonus, equity, benefits, and Employee Travel Credits.
• Airbnb mentions additional benefits and inclusion efforts, and provides disability accommodations for the hiring process.