Airbnb was born in 2007 when two Hosts welcomed three guests to their San Francisco home, and has since grown to over 4 million Hosts who have welcomed more than 1 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.

Staff Engineer, Payments Compliance

The Job

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 role:

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 in expertise of managing large scale, and 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.

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.

What you will do:

• Lead the development and refinement of systems powering compliance.
• Partner with technical leaders inside and outside of Compliance to design and build the next-generation Compliance system that is service-oriented, configurable, auditable and efficiently leverages 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.

About You:

• 12+ years of technical experience, with 8+ years of relevant industry experience in a fast paced tech environment.
• Prior knowledge of Regulatory Compliance standards and experience in implementing those controls is required.
• 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.
• 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.)
• Exposure to 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.
• End-to-end ownership mentality that transcends team boundaries.