Senior Data Scientist - Payments (Inference)

The Community You Will Join:

You will join the Payments Data Science organization, which sits at the intersection of Trust and Payments and powers the systems that move money safely and efficiently across Airbnb's global marketplace. The team spans payment optimization for guests and hosts, fraud and risk mitigation, complex measurement, and regulatory compliance. We partner directly with Payments product and engineering leadership, Finance, and Trust to ensure every transaction is fast, safe, and compliant at global scale. Our work directly shapes decisions made by senior leaders, including Payments executive leadership, and requires a rigorous, evidence-based approach to every recommendation we make. Our Data Science team enables this mission by providing reliable measurement frameworks to deliver robust data insights, build and enable state-of-the-art data products/models, and provide actionable and reliable business guidance.

The Difference You Will Make:

We are looking for a passionate data scientist to lead quantitative measurement efforts and bring novel scientific approaches to drive decision making across our platform’s payment experience. This data scientist will perform careful hypothesis generation, causal inference framework development, and model development/evaluation to ideate and drive payment strategies on our platform. This role will have a particular focus on payments fraud mitigation and loss optimization, with the goal of making our platform safer for our community.

Our Data Scientists have a deep understanding of causal framework development, statistical analysis, machine learning model development and evaluation strategies, and the complications of running experiment/quasi-experimental methods in a two-sided marketplace. They have keen business sense and are able to develop novel solutions to fraud and risk problems that don't have an established playbook and utilize their findings to communicate across a wide range of partners to drive our data & product roadmaps. They are not only the trusted data expert on their team, but also a storyteller.

Examples of projects you may work on include, development of novel metrics and frameworks that can efficiently measure outcomes (often balancing competing tradeoffs), generating deep root cause investigations and long term impact measurements, and building/evaluating ML and agentic models to optimize guest, host, and business outcomes.

A Typical Day:

• Inference: Develop and apply causal inference methods, including experimental, econometric regressions, and quasi-experimental methods to measure a wide-range of platform/product impacts.
• AI/ML: Build methods for robust evaluation of ML/AI model efficiency and performance. Ability to identify use-cases for and develop predictive models to classify, segment, and interpret our users’ behavior. Support evaluation and optimization of agentic and LLM-based systems.
• Optimization: Develop methodologies to explore/simulate the impact of new interventions and develop data products to optimize product/operational strategies.
• Communication: Deliver robust research reports and effective data visualizations. Collaborate with and present to stakeholders to identify opportunities and communicate findings, and drive impact.
• Empowerment: Think strategically about opportunities to improve and scale our brand measurement and customer insights.

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: reasonableaccommodations@airbnb.com. 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.

Equal Employment Opportunity:

Airbnb values diversity & belonging and is proud to be an Equal Employment Opportunity employer. All individuals seeking employment at Airbnb are considered without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, age, gender, sex, marital status, ancestry, physical or mental disability, veteran status, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, or any other legally protected characteristic.

How We'll Take Care of You:

Our job titles may span more than one career level. The actual base pay is dependent upon many factors, such as: training, transferable skills, work experience, business needs and market demands. The base pay range is subject to change and may be modified in the future. This role may also be eligible for bonus, equity, benefits, and Employee Travel Credits.

Pay Range

$179,000—$210,000 USD

Reasonable Accommodations: We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations throughout the recruitment process for applicants with disabilities. If you need assistance, or an accommodation, please let your recruiter know once you are contacted about a role.

A Note on Recruiting Scams: Scammers sometimes pose as Airbnb recruiters to get money or personal information from candidates. A few things that will always be true for Airbnb’s hiring process: our open roles are posted on Airbnb’s Career’s Page at careers.airbnb.com, and our recruiters correspond only from @airbnb.com or @ext.airbnb.com email addresses. Our recruiters will never ask for your Social Security number, bank account details, passport, or payment app information while you are interviewing. We’ll also never ask you to pay a fee, send money, deposit or cash a check, or purchase work-related equipment (such as a company laptop) during the interview process. We encourage candidates to remain vigilant of these recruiting scams and not share sensitive information if you do not believe an individual is actually affiliated with Airbnb.