Description
We are looking for a seasoned technical leader to join our Payments Compliance team as a Senior Staff Engineer. In this role, you will be responsible for owning the technical vision and architectural direction across the full Compliance engineering landscape, spanning Policy Enforcement, Identity, Screening, Auditing, and Compliance Experience.
As a Senior Staff Engineer, you will serve as the connective tissue across Compliance's multi-year strategic initiatives, defining how components fit together, identifying where capabilities can be shared rather than duplicated, and ensuring we leverage platform investments from partner teams.
Your decisions will directly affect how Airbnb meets obligations such as Anti-Money Laundering (AML), Know Your Customer (KYC), and sanctions screening while minimizing operational cost and customer friction.
This role extends well beyond the Compliance organization itself. You will partner directly with cross-organizational engineering teams, as well as cross-functional stakeholders across Product, Content, Legal, and Design.
The technical choices you make carry direct financial and legal exposure , requiring the judgment, depth of expertise, and organizational credibility to drive high-stakes design tradeoffs across team boundaries.
Key responsibilities include:
- Owning the end-to-end system design vision for the Compliance organization, setting the architectural direction for an engineering organization of nearly 30 engineers across multiple teams.
- Driving foundational architectural shifts, including the move from an account-centric model to a customer-centric one , rethinking how we model identity, risk, and enforcement across the platform.
- Leading the technical strategy for expanding KYC capabilities , supporting small and medium businesses, reimagining business onboarding and account structures, enabling KYC through third-party APIs, and extending verification to third-party payees.
- Architecting systems that adapt to the evolving digital identity landscape , including new verification standards, government-issued digital credentials, and shifting privacy regulations , without requiring costly re-platforming.
- Ensuring our technical foundations are flexible enough to absorb unforeseen regulatory mandates with aggressive timelines, without destabilizing existing systems or requiring disproportionate engineering investment.
- Partnering with technical leaders across multiple organizations to drive alignment on shared capabilities and cohesive system design, reducing duplication and compounding technical debt.
- Working closely with Product, Design, Policy, Legal, Operations, and other cross-functional partners as part of a globally distributed team to define and ship impactful features.
Requirements include:
- 15+ years of technical experience, with 10+ years of relevant industry experience in a fast-paced tech environment.
- Prior knowledge of Regulatory Compliance standards (AML, KYC, sanctions screening) and demonstrated experience designing and implementing those controls at scale.
- Proven track record of setting technical direction and architectural strategy for a large engineering organization, with the ability to drive alignment across organizational boundaries.
- Experience designing systems that span multiple teams and domains, with a focus on cohesion, reusability, and long-term maintainability over initiative-by-initiative solutions.
- Excellent communication skills and the ability to influence senior technical and non-technical stakeholders across the company.
- Strong problem solver with deep experience operating and leading on-call for production systems at scale.
- Technical leadership: hands-on experience leading large project teams, making high-stakes design tradeoffs, and translating regulatory requirements into scalable system architectures.
- BS/MS/PhD in Computer Science, a related field, or equivalent work experience.
- Proficiency in one or more back-end server languages (Java/Ruby/Go/C++/etc.)
- Deep understanding of 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. You think in terms of platforms, not projects.
- End-to-end ownership mentality that transcends team boundaries, with the credibility and judgment to make decisions that carry direct financial and legal implications.