Staff Software Engineer, Payments

The Community You Will Join:

Airbnb’s mission is to create a world where anyone can belong anywhere. Airbnb Payments team supports this mission by economically empowering Airbnb businesses and our global community of guests and hosts. 

The Payments Funds Ledger team is part of the core platform within the Airbnb Payments ecosystem. Our mission is to enable real-time, reliable, and scalable tracking of money movements and balances for Airbnb and its users—bringing transparency and trust to every transaction.

We build and operate the fund management system that serves as the single source of truth for all types of value on the Airbnb marketplace—such as guest payins, host payouts, incentives, and stored value—ensuring strong financial integrity and traceability of funds. We also help secure money movements by providing freeze capabilities that allow us to control the flow of funds in response to suspicious activity or regulatory restrictions. In addition, our systems offer advanced reconciliation capabilities that help detect issues with money movement early and ensure consistency across various components of the platform.

We work closely with all Payments functions, as well as the Risk & Compliance, Trust, Data and Finance teams, moving over $140 billion in funds annually across 190+ countries and more than 70 currencies.

The Difference You Will Make:

We’re looking for engineers with experience in the Payments domain who are independent, thoughtful, creative, focused on quality, and passionate about building the best payment platform.

As a Staff Software Engineer on the Payments Funds Ledger team, you will:

• Design and build highly scalable, reliable, and maintainable distributed systems.
• Make and own critical technical decisions.
• Advise on architecture and propose solutions to complex payments problems that span multiple teams and organizations.
• Provide guidance on the performance, scalability, reliability, testability, and engineering best practices of the payments platform.
• Coach and mentor junior engineers.
• Champion a culture of quality and engineering excellence.
• Collaborate with product managers and other stakeholders to turn high-level ideas into concrete initiatives.
• Actively contribute to defining and managing the team’s roadmap.

A Typical Day: 

• Design and build a platform that has strong reliability, availability and  redundancy function.
• Build APIs and data models that can handle high QPS traffic with strong consistency and availability.
• Implement effective monitoring and alerting to ensure smooth functioning of the platform.
• Partner with Product and other stakeholders to innovate and lead new initiatives to improve our Payments transactions recording, orchestration, anomaly detections, reconciliation, payin and payout qualities.
• Use agile methodologies such as Scrum for effective planning and execution of projects that advance the roadmap.
• Maintain and resolve technical debt in payments platforms. 

Your Expertise:

• 9+ years of software development experience with a minimum of 5 years experience working within payments.
• Bachelor’s and/or Master’s degree, preferably in CS, or equivalent experience.
• Experience leading design, implementation, and deployment of one or more high scale, cross-functional payment systems.
• Experience driving  initiatives that span across teams or departments.
• Ability to work independently while showing being able to deliver production ready code with minimal guidance.
• Deep understanding of async programming models (events, callbacks, promises, async/await).
• Experience with Java.
• Experience with relational databases and caching solutions.
• Experience in designing APIs and building RESTful services.
• Experience with message queuing, data streaming, and workflow frameworks.
• Experience with distributed systems and service-oriented architecture.
• Experience with Agile software development and Agile software solutions.

Your Location:

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. While the position is Remote Eligible, you must live in a state where Airbnb, Inc. has a registered entity. Click here for the up-to-date list of excluded states. This list is continuously evolving, so please check back with us if the state you live in is on the exclusion list. If your position is employed by another Airbnb entity, your recruiter will inform you what states you are eligible to work from. 

Our Commitment To Inclusion & 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.

We strive to also provide a disability inclusive application and interview process. If you are a candidate with a disability and require reasonable accommodation in order to submit an application, please contact us at: [email protected]. Please include your full name, the role you’re applying for and the accommodation necessary to assist you with the recruiting process. 

We ask that you only reach out to us if you are a candidate whose disability prevents you from being able to complete our online application.