Senior Staff Software Engineer, Trust

Airbnb is a global platform that connects hosts and guests for unique stays and experiences. The Trust team is responsible for developing technology to protect the community from fraud and ensuring safety standards are met. As a Senior Staff Software Engineer, you will lead engineering efforts to enhance trust and safety across the platform.

Responsibilities:

• 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

Requirements:

• 12+ years of backend & platform engineering designing, building, and operating mission-critical distributed systems at scale
• BS, MS or Ph.D. in computer science or related field, or equivalent work experience
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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)
• 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
• Experience in the Trust and Risk domain is a plus