Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Trust

About the Role

Airbnb's Trust team builds technology to protect its community and platform from online and offline fraud and to support user onboarding, screening, identity, and reputation. As a Senior Machine Learning Engineer, you will own ML projects end-to-end, from model design and training through deployment and operation at scale. Your work will address account takeover, fake accounts, payment fraud, bot detection, and other threats while preserving a welcoming user experience.

Responsibilities

• Collaborate with product managers, data scientists, software engineers, fraud intelligence, and operations teams to identify opportunities, scope ML solutions, and refine requirements.
• Design, build, and productionize end-to-end ML pipelines, including feature engineering, training, evaluation, and deployment for batch and real-time use cases.
• Investigate emerging fraud patterns and threat signals, and develop ML detections and tools that support faster, more accurate responses.
• Write, review, and ship clean, testable code; improve pipelines and optimize features for scalability and reliability.
• Work with large-scale structured and unstructured data to improve models for product, business, and operational use cases.
• Participate in code reviews, design discussions, and cross-team collaboration.
• Partner with trust defense and platform teams to adapt models and systems to evolving fraud attacks.
• Build and optimize top-of-funnel fraud detection models to strengthen early detection and system-wide defenses.
• Prototype and productionize innovative ML techniques for emerging fraud vectors.
• Explore LLMs and generative AI for fraud and abuse detection, investigation, and response.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of industry experience in applied machine learning, with a track record of building and productionizing models at scale.
• Strong Python programming skills and familiarity with Scala, Java, or equivalent.
• Solid understanding of ML best practices, including training/serving skew minimization, A/B testing, feature engineering, and model selection, and algorithms such as gradient boosted trees, neural networks, transformers, and deep learning.
• Experience with TensorFlow, PyTorch, or equivalent ML frameworks and tooling.
• Experience in data engineering and building end-to-end ML pipelines for batch and real-time systems.
• Exposure to architectural patterns for large-scale applications, including well-designed APIs, high-volume data pipelines, and efficient algorithms.
• Experience with test-driven development, incremental delivery, and deployment practices.
• Bachelor's, Master's, or PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or a related field.
• Experience designing and implementing ML evaluation frameworks, including ground truth, offline and online metrics, and model calibration.

Preferred Qualifications

• Exposure to Trust and Risk domains such as fraud detection, anomaly detection, identity, and account integrity.
• Experience with or strong interest in LLMs and generative AI.

Location

This role is US remote eligible, with occasional office work or offsite attendance as agreed with your manager. You must live in a state where Airbnb, Inc. has a registered entity. State exclusions may change; candidates should check the current eligibility list. If employed by another Airbnb entity, your recruiter will explain eligible states.

Compensation

The annual base pay range is $200,000–$227,000 USD. Actual pay depends on training, transferable skills, experience, business needs, and market demands. The range may change. The role may also be eligible for bonus, equity, benefits, and Employee Travel Credits.

Application and Interview Information

• Candidates whose disability prevents completion of the online application may contact reasonableaccommodations@airbnb.com with their full name, the role, and the accommodation needed. Candidates may also discuss recruitment accommodations with their recruiter.
• Official roles are posted at careers.airbnb.com. Recruiters correspond only from @airbnb.com or @ext.airbnb.com addresses.
• During interviews, Airbnb recruiters will not request Social Security numbers, bank account details, passport information, or payment app information. They will never require fees, money transfers, depositing or cashing checks, or purchases of work equipment.