# Senior Staff Software Engineer, Trust

**Company:** [Airbnb](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/airbnb)
**Location:** Remote
**Role:** Backend Engineering
**Salary:** $248k – $310k/yr
**Experience:** 12+ years
**Skills:** Kotlin, Java, Scala, LLMs, Distributed Systems, Observability, SLOs, Incident Response, Ai-Assisted Development, Platform Engineering
**Posted:** 2026-04-21

> Senior Staff Software Engineer leads Trust Platform vision, architecture, and development for fraud/safety systems at scale. Requires 12+ years backend experience, reliability expertise, and cross-team collaboration using modern languages and AI tools.

## Job Description

## 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.

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