Senior Staff Software Engineer, Trust

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.
• 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 focusing 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, 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).
• 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).

Nice-to-Haves

• Experience building developer experience & tooling, with a mindset of treating internal developers as customers and championing self-service, documentation, and delightful DX.
• Experience in the Trust and Risk domain.