Staff Software Engineer, Payments Funds Ledger

Details

Airbnb’s Payments Funds Ledger team builds and operates the fund management system that serves as the single source of truth for money movements and balances across the Airbnb marketplace (guest payins, host payouts, incentives, stored value, etc.). The team focuses on real-time, reliable, and scalable tracking of funds with strong financial integrity, traceability, freeze capabilities for controlling flows, and advanced reconciliation to detect issues early. The Payments organization moves over $140 billion annually across 190+ countries and 70+ currencies.

Responsibilities

• Design and build highly scalable, reliable, and maintainable distributed systems for payments and funds tracking.
• Make and own critical technical decisions and advise on architecture across teams and organizations.
• Provide guidance on performance, scalability, reliability, testability, and engineering best practices of the payments platform.
• Design and build APIs and data models that can handle high QPS traffic with strong consistency and availability.
• Implement monitoring and alerting to ensure smooth platform operation.
• Collaborate with product managers and stakeholders to turn high-level ideas into concrete initiatives and contribute to the team roadmap.
• Coach and mentor junior engineers and champion a culture of quality and engineering excellence.
• Maintain and resolve technical debt in payments platforms; partner with Risk & Compliance, Trust, Data, and Finance teams.

Typical Day

• Design and build platforms with strong reliability, availability, and redundancy.
• Build APIs and data models for high-throughput, consistent operations.
• Implement effective monitoring/alerting and handle operational incidents.
• Partner with Product and stakeholders to lead initiatives improving payments transaction recording, orchestration, anomaly detection, reconciliation, payin and payout quality.
• Use agile methodologies (e.g., Scrum) for planning and execution.

Requirements

• 9+ years of software development experience, with a minimum of 5 years working within payments.
• Bachelor’s and/or Master’s degree (preferably in Computer Science), or equivalent experience.
• Experience leading design, implementation, and deployment of one or more high-scale, cross-functional payment systems.
• Experience driving initiatives that span across teams or departments and delivering production-ready code with minimal guidance.
• Deep understanding of async programming models (events, callbacks, promises, async/await).
• Experience with Java.
• Experience with relational databases and caching solutions.
• Experience designing APIs and building RESTful services.
• Experience with message queuing, data streaming, and workflow frameworks.
• Experience with distributed systems and service-oriented architecture.
• Experience with Agile software development practices.

Location & Eligibility

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

Benefits & Compensation

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

Inclusion

Airbnb is committed to inclusion and belonging and encourages applicants from diverse backgrounds. Reasonable accommodations are available for candidates with disabilities via the provided accommodations contact.