Description
We're looking for a Senior Software Engineer to join our Payments AI/ML Foundation team. As a member of this team, you will design and own core platform components that power AI across Airbnb Payments.
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.
As a Senior Software Engineer on Payments AI/ML Foundation, you will:
- Design and own core platform components that power AI across Airbnb Payments
- 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
- Raise the bar on reliability, performance, and governance for models and agents in production
A typical day for this role will involve envisioning, championing, and supporting the development of novel ML systems, product integrations, and performance optimizations to solve real-world problems.
You will 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 should include:
- A degree in Computer Science 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 and 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.