Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Payments

Details

Airbnb's Payments organization is responsible for settling money across Airbnb’s global marketplace and ensuring a secure, intuitive payment experience. The Payments modeling team builds intelligences and personalizations to optimize transaction flows, collect payments, distribute payouts, and prevent fraud. This role focuses on turning advanced AI/ML — including LLMs and real-time defenses — into production systems at global scale.

Responsibilities

• Spearhead development of LLM agents, real-time anomaly detectors, and other solutions that address real-world payments problems.
• Collaborate with product, engineering, operations, and data science teams to identify high-leverage opportunities, refine AI/ML requirements, and measure business impact with data-driven metrics.
• Design, train, deploy, and operate large-scale AI applications for both batch and streaming workloads with low latency and high reliability.
• Build continuous improvement pipelines with automated monitoring and retraining loops to manage drift, cost, and latency.
• Architect end-to-end solutions (inference stacks, model governance, MLOps) and set technical standards for model governance and continuous learning.
• Mentor and lead other engineers, fostering an experimentation-driven environment where research meets production engineering.

Requirements

• 9+ years of industry experience in applied AI/ML; MS or PhD in a relevant field is expected.
• Strong programming skills in Python and/or Java and strong data engineering capabilities.
• Proven mastery of modern AI/LLM workflows: prompt engineering, fine-tuning (e.g., 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 technologies: PyTorch/TensorFlow; scalable inference stacks (Triton, vLLM); vector search; orchestration/MLOps platforms (Kubeflow, Airflow); large-scale data 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 knowledge of AI/ML applications in the Payments domain is highly desirable.

Location & Working Model

• This position is US — Remote Eligible. Candidates must live in a U.S. state where Airbnb, Inc. has a registered entity (some states may be excluded; see Airbnb careers page for details).
• The role may include occasional work at an Airbnb office or attendance at offsites as agreed with your manager.

Benefits & Compensation

• Base pay range (subject to change): $204,000—$255,000 USD.
• Role may be eligible for bonus, equity, benefits, and Employee Travel Credits.
• Airbnb emphasizes inclusion and provides disability accommodations during the application and interview process ([email protected]).