Senior Software Engineer, Payments

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:

The Vision of the POET function is to be the Customer Champion for Payments Engineering by driving the Flow Level Observability, Operational Excellence & Reliability Capabilities. POET achieves the same by

• Being the ‘Voice of Customer’ - understanding customer impacting issues through proactive and reactive channels
• Driving ‘Root-cause fixes’ by working in collaboration with the Engineering, Product & Partnership teams
• Enabling the ‘Foundational capabilities’ & AI driven Automations that unlock productivity at scale

The role:

We are looking for a self-motivated engineer who can work in a highly dynamic environment by collaborating with cross-functional and cross-geographical teams. As a Senior Software Engineer, you are expected to bring in-depth technical expertise of building and managing large scale platforms to improve the availability of our Payments platform for all our internal & external stakeholders. You will also be expected to play a critical role in developing and maintaining the tools and systems that enable Airbnb’s engineering teams to operate services reliably and at scale. You will collaborate closely with other Payments engineering teams & Infra teams to ensure services are instrumented, scalable, and resilient to support our growing business.

The Difference You Will Make:

• Design, implement, and maintain systems and tools at a platform level that support Flow level observability, Payments reliability.
• Identify and drive improvements to increase the Payments Availability, Observability, and Resiliency of Airbnb Payments
• Develop observability standards/ framework for new product readiness to ensure service reliability in SOA and distributed systems
• Build Domain Expertise to achieve Scalability - by understanding the nuances of Payments - across processing, compliance and infra
• Drive large scale migration and adoption projects on Observability & Reliability by cross-collaborating with various Payments teams
• Lead initiatives that promote a culture of reliability throughout the organization by improving incident management platforms and instrumentation.
• Continuously evaluate new technologies including AI/ML and industry best practices to embed into Observability & Reliability initiatives.
• Drive initiatives independently to fix root-causes identified from the repeat issues observed across monitoring platforms - challenge the status quo and follow through to completion

A Typical Day:

• Build backend services and APIs to create scalable engineering systems
• Collaborating across engineering, data & operations teams to embed reliability and resilience in service designs
• Enhance system reliability by leading and coordinating RCAs and long-term fixes
• Influencing architectural decisions toward reliability and scalability
• Collaborate with large set of stakeholders across engineering, infrastructure and operations teams to align and implement foundational & Operational programs
• Reviewing code and design docs, giving feedback on product specs and mocks. Mentor and guide less-experienced engineers in reliability best practices

Your Expertise:

• 7+ years of experience in back-end software development focusing on large-scale distributed systems.
• BE/B.tech in Computer Science or a related technical field.
• Strong software development skills in one or more languages such as Java / Python / Kotlin / Scala / Ruby on Rails
• Experience in building intelligent AI agents, and systems powered by Large Language Models is a big plus.
• Evidence of exposure to architectural patterns of a large, high-scale web application (e.g., well-designed APIs, high volume data pipelines, efficient algorithms).
• Familiarity with cloud platforms like AWS or Google Cloud Platform.
• Deep understanding of software development best practices, including version control, automated testing, CI/CD, and code reviews.
• Experience in incident management, monitoring, alerting, and root cause analysis.
• Effective leadership and communication skills to coordinate cross-functional teams during large scale projects
• Experience with initiatives across Auto scaling, Self-healing mechanism, Chaos Engineering, Performance optimization techniques will be a plus. Previous experience in AI/ML will also be a plus.
• You are a strong problem solver and have worked in a team that is on-call for production systems before
• You are passionate about efficiency, availability, technical quality and system quality

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.