What is Trust at Airbnb?

Airbnb is built on trust. Over two million people stay on Airbnb every night and the Trust Engineering team keeps our hosts and guests safe and supported throughout the entire Airbnb experience. We’re creating new relationships & placing people in vulnerable situations. Therefore trust is the fundamental currency of Airbnb. The Trust team builds trust by creating safety at every stage of the journey from the moment the user visits Airbnb. We set the standards & expectations for our community, keep bad actors out and and build products for good users to thrive without getting caught in the net.

We constantly work to fight against online fraud (through compromised accounts, spam and scam in messages, fake inventory, etc.) as well as preventing offline incidents (theft, property damage, personal safety, etc.). We work on onboarding and making accounts secure, and think about complex topics like identity, reputation, privacy, and anti-discrimination to ensure that every interaction with Airbnb helps build trust in us and our community. Trust Engineering is responsible for the technology vision and development of a complex stack that runs on every key interaction on the platform.

What is a Software Engineer on the Trust team?

As an engineer on the Trust team, you will help us build trust with our community of users and help keep the community safe by working across diverse teams and systems to enable sophisticated safety strategies. You are eager to understand complex systems top to bottom and thrive working across technologies and codebases. Your contributions take a variety of shapes:

• Architecting powerful yet seamless end-to-end user products to keep Airbnb community safe
• Building a long-term technology stack with well defined APIs that is service-oriented, modular, granular, observable, and efficient
• Working with cross-functional teams with design, product, data science, and research partners to drive engineering decisions and influence outcomes

Projects we are working on:

• Creating products to deter and defend against account fraud with more secure yet seamless ways of onboarding and authentication like using biometrics, Web Authentication, and passwordless methods with one time code login. Our work has had a major impact in increasing signup/login success rates, revenue, and reducing account takeovers.
• Developing machine learning models to detect risk that informs product decisions.
• Improving and extending the fraud investigation tools used by Airbnb operations. These tools aggregate and display data from across Airbnb’s internal systems, and enable our operations team to make accurate, efficient decisions on potentially fraudulent transactions, fake accounts, and more.
• Building the next version of authentication Infrastructure to power authentication across all applications at Airbnb. The Trust team provides central infrastructure to securely authenticate all Airbnb users, while also enabling Airbnb to expand globally by offering various localized authentication mechanisms.
• Developing a configurable suite of user experiences, machine learning models, and agent tooling that combat spam, scams, fake reviews, fake homes and experiences, and other types of abuse on the platform, while building trust between hosts and their guests
• Improving the detection of fraudulent login attempts with better machine learning models and rule engines. By blocking more fraudsters and reducing login friction for good users, we build more trust with our community while increasing the bookings revenue for the company.

Requirements:

• 5+ years of industry experience on large scale systems
• Passion for building user-facing products or large backend systems.
• Experience in any of the following: C/C++, Java, JavaScript, Python/Django, Scala, or Ruby/Ruby on Rails
• Ability to write high performance production quality code
• Exposure to architectural patterns of large, high-scale web applications, such as well-designed APIs, high volume data pipelines, and efficient algorithms.
• Experience or desire to work collaboratively in cross-functional teams with design, product, data science, and research partners.
• Passion for creating a highly effective technology platform for our growing global workforce
• Ability to effectively communicate with non-technical stakeholders such as legal and operations.

The starting base pay for this role is between $164,000 and $215,000. The actual base pay is dependent upon many factors, such as education, experience and skills. 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.