Senior Staff Software Engineer, Trust

About the Role

As a senior technical individual contributor on the Trust team, you will partner closely with leaders across the broader technical organization to design, execute, and deliver a complex and collaborative roadmap of Trust engineering efforts. Individual contributors at Airbnb remain hands-on and actively contribute code.

Responsibilities

• Define and execute the long-term vision and strategy for the Trust Platform, driving architectural direction for foundational systems enabling 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, utilizing LLM-powered agents to generate and iterate on code alongside problem-solving, system design, and quality oversight.
• Partner with technical leaders, product managers, operations, data scientists, and Trust defense & ML teams to define platform capabilities, tackle evolving fraud threats, and deliver business impact.
• Lead and mentor engineers across teams, raising the technical bar and developing technical leaders.

Qualifications

• 12+ years of backend & platform engineering experience 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 vision with day-to-day execution, prototyping, and influencing without formal authority.
• Exceptional communication skills for cross-functional collaboration and executive presentations.
• Strong focus on reliability with deep experience building and improving observability, SLOs, incident response, and resilience patterns (circuit breakers, graceful degradation, chaos testing).
• Hands-on experience with modern languages (e.g., Kotlin, Java, Scala) and comfort evaluating/introducing new technologies including AI-assisted development workflows.
• Experience building developer experience & tooling is a plus.
• Experience in the Trust and Risk domain is a plus.