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.