Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Trust

The Community You Will Join:

Everyone at Airbnb thinks about trust, but our team obsesses over it daily. At the core of trust is safety, and thus we spend a significant amount of our time and energy keeping the community safe. The Trust team is responsible for developing the technology that helps protect our community and platform from fraud while also ensuring our hosts, guests, homes, and experiences meet our high standards. We constantly work to fight against online fraud (such as monetary loss, compromised accounts, spam and scam in messages, fake inventory, etc.) as well as offline fraud (theft, property damage, personal safety, etc.). We also work on onboarding and screening of users, and think about complex topics like identity and reputation to ensure that every interaction with Airbnb helps build trust in us and our community.

The Trust Frontier AI team is where new AI technology for Trust gets invented and proven. We build specialized models for mission-critical trust and safety problems, develop the AI agents and agentic capabilities that automate trust decisions, and create the benchmarks and evaluation harnesses that keep decision quality high as those agents take on more autonomy. We work on problems before the answer is known — prototyping, experimenting, and iterating with our partner teams until a solution proves itself against real business and top line metrics.

You'll work side-by-side with talented product managers, data scientists, software engineers, fraud intelligence, and operations teams. Together, you'll design and build ML solutions that have direct, meaningful impact on user trust, business success, and the global Airbnb community.

The Difference You Will Make:

As a Senior Machine Learning Engineer on the Trust Frontier AI team, you will actively contribute code and ideas that shape the next generation of AI systems protecting millions of Airbnb users. You'll own and deliver ML projects end-to-end, from framing an ambiguous problem and prototyping a solution, to training and productionizing models, to proving impact on top line metrics with front line teams.

You'll work on abuse behavior detection that spans multiple defenses, on AI agents that make trust decisions autonomously, and on the evaluation and benchmarking work that makes those decisions trustworthy. Much of this work is early: you will help decide what to build, not only how to build it, and you'll see it through to measurable impact on the platform.

A Typical Day:

• Frame and prototype ML and agentic solutions for problems that do not yet have an established approach, in partnership with product managers, data scientists, and front line defense teams.
• Design, build, and productionize end-to-end Machine Learning pipelines — including feature engineering, model training, evaluation, and deployment — for both batch and real-time use cases.
• Build and improve abuse behavior detection that generalizes across defenses.
• Design, launch, and iterate on AI agents that automate trust decisions, including orchestration, tool interfaces, and the guardrails that hold quality steady as autonomy increases.
• Build benchmarks, evaluation harnesses, and instrumentation that let us measure agentic and model decision quality objectively, and use them to drive real improvements.
• Develop specialized models for trust and safety use cases, and use LLMs and AI agents to accelerate how we build models.
• Write, review, and ship clean, testable code — whether training a new model, improving an existing pipeline, or optimizing a feature for scalability and reliability.
• Work with large-scale structured and unstructured data to continuously improve ML models for Airbnb product, business, and operational use cases.
• Partner with front line defense teams to validate solutions through experiments and holdouts, and quantify their impact on business and operational metrics.
• Participate in code reviews, design discussions, and cross-team collaborations to contribute to a high-quality ML engineering culture.

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

$200,000—$235,000 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.