In this role, you'll collaborate with cross-functional teams to define, design, and deliver new features, proactively identify opportunities for, and driving improvements to, current programming practices, including process enhancements and tool upgrades. You'll present technical information to teams and stakeholders, providing guidance and insight on development processes and technologies.

Ideally, you'd have 8+ years of full-time engineering experience, post-graduation, with specialties in back-end systems, specifically related to building large-scale data storage, streaming, and warehousing systems. You'll need extensive experience in various database technologies, streaming/processing solutions, indexing/caching, and various data query engines.

As a Staff Software Engineer, you'll provide technical leadership, including upholding and upleveling engineering standards across the organization, mentoring junior engineers. You'll possess excellent communication and collaboration skills, and the ability to translate complex technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders.

Experience working fluently with standard containerization & deployment technologies like Kubernetes and various public cloud offerings is essential. You'll also need extensive experience in software development and a deep understanding of distributed systems, cloud platforms, and data systems.

You'll drive cross-functional collaboration and communication at an organizational or broader level, and be excited to work with AI technologies.

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The Payments AI/ML Foundation team builds the shared platforms, services, and guardrails that enable product and data teams across Airbnb Payments to deliver trustworthy, efficient, and scalable AI capabilities.

As a Senior Software Engineer on Payments AI/ML Foundation, you will:

• Design and own core platform components that power AI across Airbnb Payments
• Partner with product, infra, data science, and operations to translate ambiguous requirements into robust systems with clear SLAs
• Build tooling and automation that makes AI development safer and faster
• Raise the bar on reliability, performance, and governance for models and agents in production

A typical day for this role will involve envisioning, championing, and supporting the development of novel ML systems, product integrations, and performance optimizations to solve real-world problems.

You will work collaboratively with cross-functional partners including software engineers, product managers, operations and data scientists, identify opportunities for business impact, understand, refine, and prioritize requirements for AI/ML models, drive engineering decisions, and quantify impact.

Hands-on productionize and operate AI/ML solution and pipelines at scale, including both batch and real-time use cases.

Lead, mentor, challenge and grow enthusiastic, collaborative AI/ML culture within the organization.

Your expertise should include:

• A degree in Computer Science or equivalent qualification
• 7+ years of industry experience in backend/platform engineering (or equivalent), including ownership of production systems
• Strong programming skills in Python, plus solid data engineering foundations
• Good to have experience with AI frameworks (Langraph, Strand etc), orchestration (Airflow/Kubeflow), and streaming/processing (Kafka/Spark/Ray)
• Proven track record building observability for AI systems (metrics/logging/traces), with automated alerting, dashboards, and SLO management
• Experience designing model governance and safety guardrails (prompt/version control, red-teaming, policy checks, approvals)
• Demonstrated ability to drive performance/cost optimizations (profiling, batching, caching, quantization, autoscaling) in high-traffic environments
• Practical familiarity with vector search/embedding pipelines (indexing strategies, consistency, reindexing, retention)

Our commitment to inclusion and belonging:

Airbnb is committed to working with the broadest talent pool possible. We believe diverse ideas foster innovation and engagement, and allow us to attract creatively-led people, and to develop the best products, services and solutions.

All qualified individuals are encouraged to apply.

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