Staff Software Engineer, Payments Funds Ledger

Details

Airbnb was born in 2007 when two hosts welcomed three guests to their San Francisco home, and has since grown to over 5 million hosts who have welcomed over 2 billion guest arrivals in almost every country across the globe. Every day, hosts offer unique stays and experiences that make it possible for guests to connect with communities in a more authentic way.

Role Overview

Airbnb’s mission is to create a world where anyone can belong anywhere. The Airbnb Payments team supports this mission by economically empowering Airbnb businesses and our global community of guests and hosts.

The Payments Funds Ledger team is part of the core platform within the Airbnb Payments ecosystem. Our mission is to enable real-time, reliable, and scalable tracking of money movements and balances for Airbnb and its users—bringing transparency and trust to every transaction.

We build and operate the fund management system that serves as the single source of truth for all types of value on the Airbnb marketplace—such as guest payins, host payouts, incentives, and stored value—ensuring strong financial integrity and traceability of funds. We also help secure money movements by providing freeze capabilities that allow us to control the flow of funds in response to suspicious activity or regulatory restrictions. In addition, our systems offer advanced reconciliation capabilities that help detect issues with money movement early and ensure consistency across various components of the platform.

We work closely with all Payments functions, as well as the Risk & Compliance, Trust, Data and Finance teams, moving over $140 billion in funds annually across 190+ countries and more than 70 currencies.

Responsibilities

• Design and build highly scalable, reliable, and maintainable distributed systems.
• Make and own critical technical decisions.
• Advise on architecture and propose solutions to complex payments problems that span multiple teams and organizations.
• Provide guidance on the performance, scalability, reliability, testability, and engineering best practices of the payments platform.
• Coach and mentor junior engineers.
• Champion a culture of quality and engineering excellence.
• Collaborate with product managers and other stakeholders to turn high-level ideas into concrete initiatives.
• Actively contribute to defining and managing the team’s roadmap.

Typical Day

• Design and build a platform that has strong reliability, availability and redundancy functions.
• Build APIs and data models that can handle high QPS traffic with strong consistency and availability.
• Implement effective monitoring and alerting to ensure smooth functioning of the platform.
• Partner with Product and other stakeholders to innovate and lead new initiatives to improve Payments transaction recording, orchestration, anomaly detection, reconciliation, payin and payout qualities.
• Use agile methodologies such as Scrum for effective planning and execution of projects that advance the roadmap.
• Maintain and resolve technical debt in payments platforms.

Requirements

• 9+ years of software development experience, with at least 5 years in 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 spanning across teams or departments.
• Ability to work independently and deliver 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 and solutions.

Location

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. Candidates must reside in a US state where Airbnb has a registered entity, excluding certain states as per company policy.

Benefits

• Base pay range: $204,000 — $255,000 USD annually.
• Eligible for bonus, equity, benefits, and Employee Travel Credits.
• Job titles may span multiple career levels; final base pay depends on training, skills, experience, business needs, and market demands.