Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Trust

About the Role

Airbnb's Trust Frontier AI team invents and proves new AI technology for trust and safety. The team develops specialized models, autonomous agents, benchmarks, and evaluation harnesses to protect the community from online and offline fraud and improve trust decisions.

As a Senior Machine Learning Engineer, you will contribute code and ideas and own ML projects end-to-end: framing ambiguous problems, prototyping solutions, training and productionizing models, and measuring business impact. You will collaborate with product managers, data scientists, software engineers, fraud intelligence, operations, and front line defense teams.

Responsibilities

• Frame and prototype ML and agentic solutions for problems without established approaches.
• Design, build, and productionize end-to-end ML pipelines covering feature engineering, training, evaluation, and deployment for batch and real-time use cases.
• Improve abuse behavior detection across multiple defenses.
• Design, launch, and iterate on AI agents that automate trust decisions, including orchestration, tool interfaces, and quality guardrails.
• Build benchmarks, evaluation harnesses, and instrumentation to measure and improve model and agent decision quality.
• Develop specialized trust and safety models and use LLMs and agents to accelerate model development.
• Write, review, and ship clean, testable code, optimizing pipelines and features for scalability and reliability.
• Work with large-scale structured and unstructured data to improve models for product, business, and operational use cases.
• Validate solutions through experiments and holdouts and quantify their impact on business and operational metrics.
• Participate in code reviews, design discussions, and cross-team collaboration.

Qualifications

• 5–10 years of industry experience in applied machine learning, with a track record of building and productionizing models at scale.
• 1–2+ years of hands-on experience with LLMs and generative AI, including agentic frameworks, orchestration, and evaluation.
• 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 with data engineering and end-to-end ML pipelines for batch and real-time systems.
• Experience designing ML or LLM evaluation methodologies, including benchmarks, ground truth, offline/online metrics, and calibration.
• Comfort with ambiguity and a bias toward action, including scoping loosely defined problems, prototyping quickly, and delivering measurable outcomes.
• 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.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with multimodal models involving vision, documents, or speech.
• Exposure to Trust and Risk, including fraud detection, anomaly detection, identity, or account integrity.

Location

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

Compensation

Annual base pay range: $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 them from completing the online application may contact reasonableaccommodations@airbnb.com with their full name, the role, and the accommodation needed. Other recruitment accommodations can be discussed with the recruiter once contacted.
• Official openings are listed at careers.airbnb.com. Recruiters correspond only from @airbnb.com or @ext.airbnb.com addresses.
• During interviews, Airbnb recruiters will never request Social Security numbers, bank account details, passports, payment app information, fees, money transfers, check deposits or cashing, or purchases of work equipment. Candidates should remain alert to recruiting scams.