Senior Staff Software Engineer, Trust

Details

Airbnb's Trust Engineering team develops technology that protects the community and platform from fraud, including monetary loss, compromised accounts, spam and scams in messages, fake inventory, theft, property damage, and personal safety risks. The team also works on user onboarding and screening, identity, and reputation systems. Trust Engineering owns the technology vision and development of a complex stack supporting key interactions across the platform.

As a senior technical individual contributor, you will partner with leaders across Airbnb's technical organization to design, execute, and deliver a complex, collaborative roadmap of Trust engineering initiatives. Although this is one of Airbnb's highest individual-contributor levels, the role remains hands-on and requires contributing code.

Responsibilities

• Define and execute the long-term vision and strategy for the Trust Platform.
• Drive the architectural direction for foundational systems that enable scalable, high-quality fraud, safety, and trust decisioning across Airbnb.
• Dive deeply into Trust Platform components, build systems, and performance tooling to identify opportunities to improve technical quality, operational excellence, and developer experience.
• Champion an AI-first engineering approach using LLM-powered agents to generate and iterate on code while focusing on problem-solving, system design, and quality oversight.
• Partner with technical leaders, product managers, operations, data scientists, and Trust defense and machine learning teams to define and deliver platform capabilities and address evolving fraud threats.
• Lead and mentor engineers across teams, raising the technical bar and developing future technical leaders within the Trust engineering ecosystem.

Requirements

• 12+ years of backend and platform engineering experience designing, building, and operating mission-critical distributed systems at scale.
• Bachelor's, master's, or doctoral degree in computer science or a related field, or equivalent work experience.
• Proven experience guiding multi-year technical roadmaps, aligning long-term platform vision with execution across multiple sub-teams, prototyping ideas, and influencing without formal authority.
• Exceptional communication skills, including whiteboarding with senior individual contributors, partnering with cross-functional leads in Product, Design, and Data Science, and presenting strategy to executives and the broader engineering community.
• Deep experience building and improving observability, service-level objectives, incident response, and resilience patterns such as circuit breakers, graceful degradation, and chaos testing.
• Hands-on experience with modern languages such as Kotlin, Java, or Scala.
• Ability to evaluate and introduce new technologies, including AI-assisted development workflows, large language models, and code generation.
• Experience building developer experience and tooling is a plus, including self-service systems and documentation.
• Experience in the Trust and Risk domain is a plus.

Location and Work Policy

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

Compensation

The base pay range is $248,000–$310,000 USD. The role may also be eligible for bonus, equity, benefits, and Employee Travel Credits.