Staff Software Engineer, Payments

What is Payments?

Payments is key for any healthy marketplace, and is just as central to our product at Airbnb. The Payments team at Airbnb is responsible for everything related to settling money in Airbnb’s global marketplace. We build technology that powers Airbnb’s massive daily transaction volume to collect payments from guests, distribute payouts to hosts and everything in between. Our goal is to make the Payment experience on Airbnb as delightful, magical, intuitive, and easy as possible. 

If you were to join, you’ll have the opportunity to build out our next generation of Payments Platform that powers all lines of Airbnb's businesses and serves the guests/hosts community around the world. We’re responsible for the whole stack from infrastructural work that comes with scaling a global payments company, to core services processing payments, to building out the payments experiences the user sees. You’ll have the opportunity to work on very technically challenging work, as you balance moving fast with the robustness and quality that working on payments demands.

We’re looking for talented engineers who are interested in building our Payments Platform that provides for our existing and future businesses. We’re open to experienced Payments engineers as well as engineers who don’t have experience but are interested in learning more. Come join us if you want to be challenged and learn the business and skills that working on payments offers!

Meet the people, learn about the challenges, and read more about what we do at Payments here.

What is Risk and Compliance?

Payments Risk & Compliance is a Payments engineering org with the mission to deliver best in class compliance platforms & tools that eliminate legal risks, ensure regulatory compliance and enable payments operations for Airbnb Payments. Risk and Compliance ensures our right to do the business. We are a full stack team focusing on building a wide range of scalable systems and global infrastructure to protect our core payments from malicious users and fraud risk, enforce compliance controls, promote best practices to protect user privacy and enhance our internal operational efficiency. We are looking for a self-motivated backend engineer who is interested in working in a highly dynamic environment by collaborating with cross-functional and cross-site teams. As an engineer, you are in charge of coming up with creative solutions using skills including Service Oriented Architecture, real-time system, data processing pipelines, machine learning, graph algorithms, feature visualization, and payments technologies. 

What is a Staff/Senior Software Engineer on Screenings Foundation

On Airbnb platform, we collect and remit payments to 190+ countries in over 70 currencies and counting. The foundational layer to any money movement is compliance. With the globalization of Airbnb and creation of new businesses, compliance has provided ever-growing novel challenges to our in-house payments system.

The Screening Foundation team is at the beginning of the journey to build a robust, comprehensive and accurate sanctions system to ensure all payments transactions are compliant, anywhere in the world. This team is transforming the screening technologies in a multi-year effort, we have the following major technical challenges:

• Build a full in-house solution for sanctions screening. Existing vendor solution needs a complete overhaul to support our growing needs of service scalability and screening accuracy
• Evolve screening solution for string based person name matching, to a general entity based screening solution (e.g. person, business and location)
• Build a real-time sanctions screening system for hundreds of billions of dollars moving around the world, for the whole lifecycle of users, transactions and bookings
• Build a platform solution to ensure coverage, auditability and consistently for all sanctions 

As a Staff Software Engineer on the Screening Foundations team, you will:  

• Work in a highly dynamic environment by collaborating with a cross-functional team
• You’ll be responsible for coming up with creative solutions using skills including Service Oriented Architecture, real-time system, entity reconciliation/matching, graph algorithms and payments technologies
• Lead the team to design and complete our major technology transformation (see projects above), driven cross-organizational 
• Mentor and grow other engineers in the team

Minimum Requirements

• 8+ years of industry experience, including backend and full stack development
• Proficient in any of the following programming languages: C/C++, Java, C#, Python/Django, Ruby/Ruby on Rails
• Experience with scaling and maintaining high-traffic production systems (e.g.well-designed APIs, high volume data pipelines, efficient algorithms)
• Problem solving: Ability to evaluate technical approaches to problems and evaluate tradeoffs
• Communication: Ability to clearly and effectively communicate with stakeholders verbally and in writing
• Strong project scoping and project management skills
• Ability to mentor and develop other engineers
• BS in Computer Science or equivalent work-related experience

The starting base pay for this role is between $190,000 and $245,000. 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