Senior Software Engineer, Payments Transaction Risk

San Francisco · Remote · 5+ years experience · Remote · Posted Oct 13, 2026

At a glance

As part of the Payments Risk Engineering team, you will be in charge of designing and building a wide range of scalable systems and robust infrastructure to detect, mitigate and resolve risk issues across our entire payments platform.
You will protect our communities and businesses from all malicious activities and fraudulent actors.
You will be deeply involved in the technical details of building highly available and real-time risk services in close collaboration with product, data science and operations teams.

Building and maintaining a long-term technology stack with well defined APIs that is service-oriented, modular, granular, observable, and efficient.
Working closely with data scientists, product managers and other XFN partners to build business insights, develop product features and respond to fraud attacks and risk issues across the platform.
Building and maintaining integrations with third party vendors / payments networks & processors to empower our in house risk systems.
Developing and iterating on our risk detection, mitigation and resolution strategies as risk scenarios/business requirements evolve.
Focusing on continuous monitoring and alerting to uplevel the quality and observability of our risk systems.
Collaborating with other engineering teams across Airbnb to advance our engineering process and technical foundation.

5+ years of relevant industry experience (Payments/Fintech) as a backend software engineer.
Proficient in at least one major programming language (preferably Java/Kotlin/Python).
Exposure to architectural patterns of large, high-scale web applications, such as well-designed APIs, high volume data pipelines, and efficient algorithms.
Passion for delivering products end-to-end, from ideation through planning and scoping to implementation and experimental A/B testing.
Rigor in high code quality, automated testing, and other engineering best practices.
Experience or desire to work collaboratively in cross-functional teams with product, data scientists, design and operations.
Familiarity with experimentation and machine learning techniques.
Outstanding communication and interpersonal skills and detail oriented.
Capable of making data driven decisions and articulating tradeoffs in any technical decisions.
Bachelor’s and/or Master’s degree, preferably in CS, or equivalent experience.

This position is US - Remote Eligible.
The role may include occasional work at an Airbnb office or attendance at offsites, as agreed to with your manager.