Senior Staff Software Engineer, Trust

Airbnb

. 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, and are broadly leveraged across tech organizations .

Posted 4/22/2026full-timeRemote • 🇺🇸 United StatesSenior💰 $248,000 - $310,000 per yearWebsite

Tech Stack

Tools & technologies

Distributed SystemsJavaKotlinScala

About the role

Key responsibilities & impact

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, and are broadly leveraged across tech organizations
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 you focus 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

What you’ll need

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, equally 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) to keep mission-critical systems running at the highest bar.
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).
Experience building developer experience & tooling is a plus, with a mindset of treating internal developers as customers and championing self-service, documentation, and delightful DX.
Experience in the Trust and Risk domain is a plus.

Benefits

Comp & perks

This role may also be eligible for bonus, equity, benefits, and Employee Travel Credits.

ATS Keywords

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Applicant Tracking System Keywords

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Hard Skills & Tools

backend engineeringplatform engineeringdistributed systemsobservabilitySLOsincident responseKotlinJavaScalaAI-assisted development

Soft Skills

communication skillsmentoringproblem-solvinginfluencingcollaborationstrategic thinkingtechnical leadershipcross-functional partnershippresentation skillscustomer-centric mindset

Certifications

BS in Computer ScienceMS in Computer SciencePh.D. in Computer Science