Staff Software Engineer, Payments Compliance

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.

Airbnb’s business grows rapidly year over year, and so does Airbnb Payments’ processing volume. Payments Compliance is an essential part of the Payments organization. Without it, Airbnb can be subject to fines and even forbidden from conducting business in certain markets. As a Staff Engineer in the Payments Compliance team, you would drive architectural decisions and implementation for the Compliance systems.

The Difference You Will Make:

We are looking for a self-motivated leader who is interested in working in a highly dynamic environment by collaborating with cross-functional and cross-geographical teams. As a Staff Engineer, you would be expected to bring deep expertise in building and operating large-scale platforms, and support Airbnb’s entire Compliance program and scale it to efficiently adapt to ever evolving regulatory needs. The Payments Compliance systems are complex and interface with various other parts of Airbnb. The systems, APIs, experiences, and tools that you develop will implement controls to make Airbnb compliant with regulations from around the world.

This role centers on the compliance experiences that hosts and guests interact with directly, including the collection and management of the information we are required to obtain. The scope also covers screening of individuals and businesses against global regulatory requirements, and the continuous auditing that verifies our compliance controls are applied as intended. You will set technical direction across all three areas, because they are inseparable in practice: an experience is only as good as the compliance decision behind it, and neither holds up unless we can demonstrate the control was actually enforced.

As a Staff engineer, you’ll be responsible for establishing a technical vision and building alignment within engineering and cross-functional teams, all while delivering a solution that is flexible, always available, efficient, and scales with the needs of the business. Your own unique skill set, rich experiences and thought leadership will be key to success in this role.

A Typical Day:

• Lead the development and refinement of systems powering compliance.
• Partner with technical leaders inside and outside of Compliance to design and build the Compliance systems that are service-oriented, configurable, auditable and efficiently leverage existing Airbnb capabilities.
• Work closely with Product, Design, Policy, Operations and other cross-functional partners as part of a globally distributed team, to define and ship impactful features.
• Partner with other engineering teams in Airbnb to serve our users holistically.
• Lead and mentor engineers, both inside and outside your immediate team, in building solutions and developing skills.
• Advocate for and participate in efforts to advance Airbnb’s engineering processes and technical foundations. Drive systemic improvements by identifying patterns to streamline development, reduce toil and increase technical quality and operational excellence over time.

Your Expertise:

• 9+ years of industry experience in a fast paced tech environment.
• BS/MS/PhD in Computer Science, a related field, or equivalent work experience.
• You have excellent communication skills and the ability to work well within a team and with teams across the engineering organization.
• You are a strong problem solver and have led a team that is on-call for production systems before.
• Technical leadership: hands on experience leading project teams and setting technical direction and strategy.
• Nice to have: Prior knowledge of Regulatory Compliance standards and experience in implementing those controls
• Proficiency in one or more back-end server languages (Java/Ruby/Go/C++/etc.)
• Experience with HTML, CSS and modern Javascript frameworks such as React.
• Exposure to architectural patterns of high-scale web and data applications.
• Be future looking - we might be focused on immediate regulations, but need to build for the long term.
• End-to-end ownership mentality that transcends team boundaries.

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.

How We'll Take Care of You:

Our job titles may span more than one career level. The actual base pay is dependent upon many factors, such as: training, transferable skills, work experience, business needs and market demands. The base pay range is subject to change and may be modified in the future. This role may also be eligible for bonus, equity, benefits, and Employee Travel Credits.  

Pay Range$212,000—$265,000 USD