Senior Software Engineer, Payments Transaction Risk

Sorry, this job was removed at 02:51 a.m. (UTC) on Thursday, Oct 22, 2026
San Francisco, CA, USA
In-Office
Senior level
Real Estate • Travel • PropTech
The Role
Design and build scalable, highly available payment risk systems that detect, mitigate, and resolve fraud and other threats. Develop APIs, real-time services, monitoring, alerts, vendor and payment-network integrations, and evolving risk strategies. Collaborate with product managers, data scientists, operations, and engineering teams to deliver secure payment capabilities, respond to attacks, and improve system quality and observability.
Summary Generated by Built In

Airbnb was born in 2007 when two hosts welcomed three guests to their San Francisco home, and has since grown to over 5 million hosts who have welcomed over 2 billion guest arrivals in almost every country across the globe. Every day, hosts offer unique stays and experiences that make it possible for guests to connect with communities in a more authentic way.

The Community You Will Join:

Airbnb Payments team allows any two people in the world to frictionlessly exchange money with easy to use payments services. It is a core strategy to fulfill Airbnb’s belongs anywhere mission.We are building a world-class payments platform that moves billions of dollars, in 191 countries, with 75 currencies, through a complex ecosystem of payments partners. We build and maintain our own in-house global payments platform because no solution exists with the global reach needed. As the platform grows we’ll be adding new payment partners, global licenses, compliance and regulation controls, and building new payment experiences for our guests and hosts. 

The Difference You Will Make:

We are looking for talented and self-motivated Senior Software Engineers who are passionate about working in this highly dynamic domain and collaborating with world-class XFN teams to advance our mission. As part of the Payments Risk Engineering team, you will be in charge of designing and building a wide range of scalable systems and robust infrastructure to detect, mitigate and resolve risk issues across our entire payments platform, and to protect our communities and businesses from all malicious activities and fraudulent actors. You will be deeply involved in the technical details of building highly available and real-time risk services in close collaboration with product, data science and operations teams to understand and react to the ever evolving risk scenarios and to make Airbnb the world’s safest while easiest to use payments platform.

A Typical Day: 

  • Building and maintaining a long-term technology stack with well defined APIs that is service-oriented, modular, granular, observable, and efficient.
  • Working closely with data scientists, product managers and other XFN partners to build business insights, develop product features and respond to fraud attacks and risk issues across the platform.
  • Building and maintaining integrations with third party vendors / payments networks & processors to empower our in house risk systems.
  • Developing and iterating on our risk detection, mitigation and resolution strategies as risk scenarios/business requirements evolve.
  • Focusing on continuous monitoring and alerting to uplevel the quality and observability of our risk systems.
  • Collaborating with other engineering teams across Airbnb to advance our engineering process and technical foundation. 

Your Expertise:

  • 5+ years of relevant industry experience (Payments/Fintech) as a backend software engineer.
  • Proficient in at least one major programming language (preferably Java/Kotlin/Python). Experience in React (or any equivalent JS library) would be nice to have.
  • Exposure to architectural patterns of large, high-scale web applications, such as well-designed APIs, high volume data pipelines, and efficient algorithms.
  • Passion for delivering products end-to-end, from ideation through planning and scoping to implementation and experimental A/B testing.
  • Rigor in high code quality, automated testing, and other engineering best practices.
  • Experience or desire to work collaboratively in cross-functional teams with product, data scientists, design and operations.
  • Familiarity with experimentation and machine learning techniques
  • Outstanding communication and interpersonal skills and detail oriented.
  • Capable of making data driven decisions and articulating tradeoffs in any technical decisions.
  • Bachelor’s and/or Master’s degree, preferably in CS, or equivalent experience.
  • Experience in fraud/spam detection/mitigation in the payments domain is a huge plus, but not required.

Your Location:

This position is US - Remote Eligible. The role may include occasional work at an Airbnb office or attendance at offsites, as agreed to with your manager. While the position is Remote Eligible, you must live in a state where Airbnb, Inc. has a registered entity. Click here for the up-to-date list of excluded states. This list is continuously evolving, so please check back with us if the state you live in is on the exclusion list. If your position is employed by another Airbnb entity, your recruiter will inform you what states you are eligible to work from.

Our Commitment To Inclusion & 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.

We strive to also provide a disability inclusive application and interview process. If you are a candidate with a disability and require reasonable accommodation in order to submit an application, please contact us at: [email protected]. Please include your full name, the role you’re applying for and the accommodation necessary to assist you with the recruiting process. 
We ask that you only reach out to us if you are a candidate whose disability prevents you from being able to complete our online application. 



Reasonable Accommodations: We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations throughout the recruitment process for applicants with disabilities. If you need assistance, or an accommodation, please let your recruiter know once you are contacted about a role.

A Note on Recruiting Scams: Scammers sometimes pose as Airbnb recruiters to get money or personal information from candidates. A few things that will always be true for Airbnb’s hiring process: our open roles are posted on Airbnb’s Career’s Page at careers.airbnb.com, and our recruiters correspond only from @airbnb.com or @ext.airbnb.com email addresses. Our recruiters will never ask for your Social Security number, bank account details, passport, or payment app information while you are interviewing.  We’ll also never ask you to pay a fee, send money, deposit or cash a check, or purchase work-related equipment (such as a company laptop) during the interview process. We encourage candidates to remain vigilant of these recruiting scams and not share sensitive information if you do not believe an individual is actually affiliated with Airbnb.


Skills Required

  • 5+ years of relevant industry experience as a backend software engineer in payments or fintech
  • Proficiency in at least one major programming language, preferably Java, Kotlin, or Python
  • Experience with architectural patterns for large-scale web applications, well-designed APIs, high-volume data pipelines, and efficient algorithms
  • Ability to deliver products end-to-end from ideation through planning, implementation, and experimentation
  • Experience with high code quality, automated testing, and engineering best practices
  • Ability to collaborate cross-functionally with product, data science, design, and operations teams
  • Familiarity with experimentation and machine learning techniques
  • Strong communication and interpersonal skills with attention to detail
  • Ability to make data-driven decisions and articulate technical tradeoffs
  • Bachelor's or master's degree, preferably in computer science, or equivalent experience
  • Experience with React or an equivalent JavaScript library
  • Experience in fraud or spam detection and mitigation in the payments domain

Airbnb Compensation & Benefits Highlights

The following summarizes recurring compensation and benefits themes identified from responses generated by popular LLMs to common candidate questions about Airbnb and has not been reviewed or approved by Airbnb.

  • Fair & Transparent Compensation — Pay ranges and total compensation components are increasingly disclosed, and country-level pay practices avoid location-based cuts, which feedback suggests improves consistency and perceived fairness.
  • Healthcare Strength — Comprehensive core health coverage for employees, mental health resources, and substantial dependent support are repeatedly highlighted as robust and a standout element of the package.
  • Leave & Time Off Breadth — Generous PTO, a winter shutdown, sabbaticals, and paid volunteer time are described as extensive, with parental leave and phased return options reinforcing time-off flexibility.

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The Company
HQ: Dublin
14,622 Employees
Year Founded: 2008

What We Do

Airbnb is a community based on connection and belonging—a community that was born in 2008 when two hosts welcomed three guests to their San Francisco home, and has since grown to 4 million hosts who have welcomed over 800 million guest arrivals to about 100,000 cities in almost every country and region across the globe. Hosts on Airbnb are everyday people who share their worlds to provide guests with the feeling of connection and being at home. At Airbnb, we believe that hosts, guests and the communities where we operate are all stakeholders we have a responsibility to serve, and that by serving them alongside our employees and investors, we will build an enduringly successful company.

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