Staff Software Engineer, Trust & Safety

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.

The Community You Will Join

Everyone at Airbnb thinks about trust, but our team obsesses over it daily. The Trust Engineering organization is responsible for protecting our community and platform from fraud and abuse while also ensuring our hosts, guests, homes, and experiences meet our high standards. This includes both foundational systems that power detection and enforcement at scale—such as rules engines, risk services, and friction frameworks—as well as applied solutions that address evolving threats like account compromise, payment fraud, fake content, and offline harm.

Trust engineers work across a diverse landscape of systems and problem spaces, partnering closely with product, data science, and operations teams. Whether building real-time infrastructure, onboarding and screening flows, or scalable tools for trust agents, the mission remains the same: to make Airbnb the most trusted community in the world.

The Difference You Will Make

As part of the Trust Engineering team, you will be in charge of designing large-scale systems to detect and mitigate fraud, abuse, and safety risks across our platform. You will be deeply involved in building highly available and real-time risk detection services in close collaboration with product, data science, and operations teams to understand ever-evolving attack vectors. You’ll also work closely with other Trust engineers—whether focused on defense or platform—to build tools and frameworks that make our defenses more adaptive, efficient, and resilient.

There are still many unsolved problems in both online and offline trust, and we're looking for talented engineers to solve these challenges with us and help shape the future of trust at Airbnb.

A Typical Day

Your contributions may take a variety of forms, including:

• Designing, implementing, and operating resilient and scalable distributed systems.
• Collaborating with cross-functional partners—including software engineers, product managers, data scientists, and operations teams—to understand business impact, define requirements, and drive engineering decisions.
• Building and evolving platform capabilities to address the ever-changing landscape of fraud, abuse, and safety risks across Airbnb.
• Partnering with teams across Trust, Payments, and Community Support to identify and implement system improvements that increase the reliability, scalability, and efficiency of our defenses.
• Contributing critical input to the Trust Engineering roadmap and long-term technical direction.
• Developing, productionizing, and operating machine learning models and pipelines at scale, for both batch and real-time use cases.
• Mentoring other engineers and helping them grow their technical and collaboration skills.
• Advocating for and contributing to improvements in Airbnb’s engineering processes and foundational systems.

Your Expertise

• 9+ years of industry engineering experience.
• BS/MS/PhD in Computer Science, a related field, or equivalent work experience
• Strong programming (Scala / Python / Java/ C++ or equivalent) and data engineering skills
• Hands on experience leading project teams and setting technical direction.
• Exposure to architectural patterns of a large, high-scale software applications (e.g., well-designed APIs, high volume data pipelines, efficient algorithms, models)
• Experience with test driven development, familiar with A/B testing, incremental delivery and deployment.
• Experience with platform architecture patterns and best practices.  Experience with building and leading infrastructure is a plus.
• Experience with the Trust and Risk domain is a plus.
• Experience with hands on machine learning model development is a plus.