Senior Staff Software Engineer (Trust)

• As a senior technical individual contributor, you will partner closely with our leaders across the broader technical organization helping design, execute and deliver in a complex and collaborative roadmap of Trust engineering efforts that will require collaboration across many parts of the organization and many parts of Airbnb

• Although you will be at one of our highest levels of seniority, all individual contributors at Airbnb are Software Engineers which means we expect you to be hands on and contribute code

• Define and execute the long-term vision and strategy for the Trust Platform, driving the architectural direction for foundational systems that enable scalable, high-quality fraud, safety, and trust decisioning across Airbnb, and are broadly leveraged across tech organizations

• Dive deep into Trust Platform components, build system and performance tooling, and identify cross-cutting opportunities to elevate technical quality, operational excellence, and developer delight

• Champion an AI-first engineering approach, using LLM-powered agents to generate and iterate on code while you focus on problem-solving, system design, and quality oversight

• Partner with technical leaders, product managers, operations, data scientists, and Trust defense & ML teams to define and drive platform capabilities, tackle evolving fraud threats, and deliver measurable business impact

• Lead and mentor engineers across teams, raising the technical bar and developing the next generation of technical leaders within the trust engineering ecosystem

Benefits

• Paid volunteer time

• Health food and snacks

• Generous parental and family leave

• Learning and development

• Annual travel and experiences credit- BS, MS or Ph.D. in computer science or related field, or equivalent work experience

• Exceptional communication skills, equally effective white-boarding with senior ICs, partnering with cross-functional leads (Product, Design, Data Science), and presenting strategy to executives and the broader engineering community

• Hands-on with modern languages (e.g., Kotlin/Java/Scala) and comfortable evaluating and introducing new technologies including AI-assisted development workflows (LLMs, code generation)

• 12+ years of backend & platform engineering designing, building, and operating mission-critical distributed systems at scale

• Experience in the Trust and Risk domain is a plus

• Proven experience guiding multi-year technical roadmaps: aligning long-term platform vision with day-to-day execution across multiple sub-teams, prototyping to iterate on ideas, and influencing without relying on formal authority

• Experience building developer experience & tooling is a plus, with a mindset of treating internal developers as customers and championing self-service, documentation, and delightful DX

• Obsessed with reliability: deep experience building and improving observability, SLOs, incident response, and resilience patterns (circuit breakers, graceful degradation, chaos testing) to keep mission-critical systems running at the highest bar