Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Payments

Details

Airbnb Payments modeling team builds intelligence and personalizations that optimize the company’s global transaction volume — collecting payments from guests, distributing payouts to hosts, and preventing fraudulent transactions.

Responsibilities

• Lead architecture, implementation, and ownership of end-to-end AI/ML solutions at global scale, with a focus on low-latency, high-reliability services for payments.
• Spearhead LLM agents, real-time anomaly detectors, and other production ML systems that create product value for payments workflows.
• Collaborate closely with product, software engineering, operations, and data science to identify high-leverage opportunities, refine requirements, and measure business impact with clear metrics.
• Design, train, deploy, and operate large-scale AI applications for both batch and streaming workloads, including automated monitoring and retraining loops to ensure continuous improvement.
• Mentor and inspire teammates, promote experimentation, and set technical standards for model governance, testing, and operational excellence.

Requirements

• 9+ years of industry experience in applied AI/ML; MS or PhD in a relevant field preferred.
• Strong programming skills, especially Python; Java experience is also listed.
• Data engineering skills and experience with large-scale data streaming and processing.
• Proven mastery of modern AI/LLM workflows: prompt engineering, fine-tuning (LoRA, RLHF), hallucination mitigation, safety guardrails, and rigorous online/offline testing to minimize training–inference drift.
• Hands-on experience with at least three of the following: PyTorch, TensorFlow, scalable inference stacks (Triton, vLLM), vector search, orchestration/MLOps platforms (Kubeflow, Airflow), large-scale streaming & processing (Spark, Ray, Kafka).
• Demonstrated success designing, deploying, and monitoring production AI systems such as RAG pipelines, personalization engines, and generative content services — including drift/cost/latency monitoring and automated retraining triggers.
• Prior experience or familiarity with AI/ML applications in the Payments domain is highly desirable.

Location & Work Model

• This position is US — Remote Eligible. Candidates must live in a U.S. state where Airbnb, Inc. has a registered entity. The role may include occasional work at an Airbnb office or attendance at offsites.

Compensation & Benefits

• Base pay range: $204,000 — $255,000 USD. The role may also be eligible for bonus, equity, benefits, and Employee Travel Credits.

Inclusion & Accommodations

• Airbnb is committed to inclusion and encourages applicants from diverse backgrounds. Reasonable accommodations are available for candidates with disabilities ([email protected]).