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:
- 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. We provide the infrastructure for training, evaluation, inference, and operations - covering model lifecycle, observability, governance, cost/latency optimization, and developer ergonomics - so teams in Payments can move quickly in AI innovation with confidence.
The Difference You Will Make:
- As a Senior Software Engineer on Payments AI/ML Foundation, you will design and own core platform components that power AI across Airbnb Payments. You will 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; and raise the bar on reliability, performance, and governance for models and agents in production.
A Typical Day:
- Envision, champion, and support the development of novel ML systems, product integrations, and performance optimizations to solve real-world problems.
- 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:
- BE/B.tech, preferably in CS, 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 & 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.
Skills Required
- Bachelor's degree (BE/B.Tech) or equivalent
- 7+ years industry experience in backend/platform engineering with ownership of production systems
- Strong programming skills in Python
- Solid data engineering foundations
- Experience building observability for AI systems (metrics, logging, traces, alerting, dashboards, SLOs)
- Experience designing model governance and safety guardrails (versioning, policy checks, approvals, red-teaming)
- Demonstrated performance and cost optimizations in high-traffic environments (profiling, batching, caching, quantization, autoscaling)
- Practical familiarity with vector search/embedding pipelines (indexing, consistency, reindexing, retention)
- Experience with AI frameworks (Langraph, Strand)
- Experience with orchestration tools (Airflow, Kubeflow)
- Experience with streaming/processing systems (Kafka, Spark, Ray)
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Airbnb Insights
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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