Airbnb is hiring a Senior Staff Engineer to serve as the Technical Lead for our Payments Compliance organization. You will own the technical vision and architectural direction across the full Compliance engineering landscape, ensuring our systems are cohesive, scalable, and aligned with company priorities within a complex global regulatory environment.
What You'll Do
- Own the end-to-end system design vision for the Compliance organization, setting architectural direction for nearly 30 engineers across multiple teams.
- Drive foundational architectural shifts, including moving from an account-centric to a customer-centric model.
- Lead technical strategy for expanding KYC capabilities, supporting businesses, reimagining onboarding, enabling third-party APIs, and extending verification.
- Architect systems that adapt to the evolving digital identity landscape and shifting privacy regulations without costly re-platforming.
- Ensure technical foundations are flexible enough to absorb unforeseen regulatory mandates with aggressive timelines.
- Partner with technical leaders across multiple organizations to drive alignment on shared capabilities and reduce duplication.
- Work closely with Product, Design, Policy, Legal, Operations, and other cross-functional partners to define and ship impactful features.
- Lead and mentor engineers both inside and outside your immediate team, raising the technical bar.
- Advocate for and drive systemic improvements to streamline development, reduce toil, and increase technical quality.
What We're Looking For
- 15+ years of technical experience.
- 10+ years of relevant industry experience in a fast-paced tech environment.
- Prior knowledge of Regulatory Compliance standards (AML, KYC, sanctions screening).
- Demonstrated experience designing and implementing compliance controls at scale.
- Proven track record of setting technical direction and architectural strategy for a large engineering organization.
- Ability to drive alignment across organizational boundaries.
- Experience designing systems that span multiple teams and domains, focusing on cohesion and long-term maintainability.
- Excellent communication skills and ability to influence senior technical and non-technical stakeholders.
- Strong problem solver with deep experience operating and leading on-call for production systems at scale.
- Hands-on experience leading large project teams, making high-stakes design tradeoffs, and translating regulatory requirements into scalable 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.
- End-to-end ownership mentality that transcends team boundaries, with credibility and judgment to make decisions with financial and legal implications.
Team & Environment
You will be the Technical Lead for the Payments Compliance organization, leading an engineering organization of nearly 30 engineers across multiple teams.
Benefits & Compensation
- Compensation range: $244,000—$305,000 USD
- Bonus eligibility
- Equity eligibility
- Benefits eligibility
- Employee Travel Credits
Work Mode
This is a remote position open to candidates located in the US.
Airbnb is committed to working with the broadest talent pool possible. All qualified individuals are encouraged to apply.
