Senior 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 Senior Staff Engineer and Technical Lead for the Payments Compliance organization, you would own the technical vision and architectural direction across the full Compliance engineering landscape — spanning Policy Enforcement, Identity, Screening, Auditing, and Compliance Experience. You will ensure our compliance systems are cohesive, scalable, and aligned with broader company priorities as we navigate an increasingly complex global regulatory environment.

The Role:

We are looking for a seasoned technical leader who can operate at the intersection of deep systems expertise and organizational influence. As a Senior Staff Engineer, you will serve as the connective tissue across Compliance's multi-year strategic initiatives — defining how components fit together, identifying where capabilities can be shared rather than duplicated, and ensuring we leverage platform investments from partner teams. Your decisions will directly affect how Airbnb meets obligations such as Anti-Money Laundering (AML), Know Your Customer (KYC), and sanctions screening while minimizing operational cost and customer friction.

This role extends well beyond the Compliance organization itself. You will partner directly with cross-organizational engineering teams, as well as cross-functional stakeholders across Product, Content, Legal, and Design. The technical choices you make carry direct financial and legal exposure — requiring the judgment, depth of expertise, and organizational credibility to drive high-stakes design tradeoffs across team boundaries.

What You Will Do:

• Own the end-to-end system design vision for the Compliance organization, setting the architectural direction for an engineering organization of nearly 30 engineers across multiple teams.
• Drive foundational architectural shifts, including the move from an account-centric model to a customer-centric one — rethinking how we model identity, risk, and enforcement across the platform.
• Lead the technical strategy for expanding KYC capabilities — supporting small and medium businesses, reimagining business onboarding and account structures, enabling KYC through third-party APIs, and extending verification to third-party payees.
• Architect systems that adapt to the evolving digital identity landscape — including new verification standards, government-issued digital credentials, and shifting privacy regulations — without requiring costly re-platforming.
• Ensure our technical foundations are flexible enough to absorb unforeseen regulatory mandates with aggressive timelines, without destabilizing existing systems or requiring disproportionate engineering investment.
• Partner with technical leaders across multiple organizations to drive alignment on shared capabilities and cohesive system design, reducing duplication and compounding technical debt.
• Work closely with Product, Design, Policy, Legal, Operations, and other cross-functional partners as part of a globally distributed team to define and ship impactful features.
• Lead and mentor engineers — both inside and outside your immediate team — raising the technical bar and developing the next generation of technical leaders ...