Staff Platform Manager – Payments, Evaluations, Automation

Role Overview

• This role will own the product vision, strategy, and execution for critical evaluation workflows for risk detection & mitigation
• Your mandate is twofold:
• Design principled evaluation frameworks that determine the right size and shape of holdouts, control groups, and manual review samples—without degrading model performance or decision quality.
• Drive automation that meaningfully reduces manual reviews, operational burden, and customer friction, while preserving the labels and signals required to keep models accurate and resilient over time.
• Success in this role is measured by sustained reductions in manual review volume, improved approval rates, stable or improving loss performance, and evaluation systems that scale as risk vectors evolve
• A typical day involves reviewing how models, holdouts, and manual reviews interact across the decisioning funnel—examining false positives, label coverage, approval lift, and downstream loss impact.
• You will work closely with Data Science, Machine Learning, Risk Engineering, and Operations to understand where current evaluation approaches over-sample good users, introduce bias, or create unnecessary friction.
• You will define the end-to-end product vision for risk evaluations and learning loops, building a multi-year roadmap that balances statistical rigor, operational efficiency, customer experience, and regulatory expectations.
• You will own requirements and execution for systems that:
• Dynamically size and manage holdouts
• Optimize when and how manual reviews are invoked
• Preserve high-quality labels without over-reliance on human review
• Enable faster, safer iteration on risk models and policies
• You will partner deeply with Fraud & Safety, Trust, Legal, Policy, Customer Support, and Payments Operations to align on decision principles and ensure evaluation strategies are understood, trusted, and actionable across the company.
• Collaborate with Payments Operations and Support to reduce manual effort, handle edge cases better, and unlock high-quality decisioning at scale.
• Key to success for this role is to partner deeply with other Airbnb platform organizations such as Fraud & Safety, AirCover, Legal, Customer Support, Policy Enforcement & Payments Operations teams to align on the vision and mission and coordinate tactics to deliver mutually aligned outcomes.

Requirements

• 9+ years of Product Management experience, or 6+ years with a BS/MS with significant work in payments, risk/fraud, chargebacks/, or marketplace integrity.
• Demonstrated experience working with model-driven systems, evaluation frameworks, experimentation, and decisioning under uncertainty.
• Strong intuition for long-tail risk problems, false positives, and the unintended consequences of sampling and labeling strategies.
• Systems thinker who can design learning loops that scale globally and remain robust as adversarial behavior evolves.
• Highly data-literate: comfortable working with loss curves, precision/recall tradeoffs, operational metrics, and model performance diagnostics.
• Systems thinker with the ability to architect modular processes that scale globally. Ability to make principled, high-judgment decisions in ambiguous, high-stakes environments. Takes ownership of multiple product areas or one with significant impact, establishing clear expectations, driving communication, quality and timely delivery. Experience designing end-to-end user experiences that balance risk mitigation with customer empathy.
• Adapts communication style according to the audience across teams, extended stakeholders and leadership. Empathetic, clear communicator who can lead cross-functional partners through influence, not authority. Autonomously communicates, influences and aligns stakeholders on the products vision/strategy.
• With minimal guidance defines products that sustain the changing needs of business, industry, users and partners with Eng/Design to translate to long term architecture and Ecosystems thinking, with clear understanding of platform capabilities to be built.
• Strong analytical chops—you’re comfortable diving into financial & customer data, operational metrics, and model performance. Proven ability to partner deeply with engineering, design, operations, data science, and legal/compliance teams.
• Comfortable working in a fast-paced environment with evolving regulatory requirements and complex trade-offs.
• Authorized to work in the United States.

Benefits

• Employee Travel Credits
• Bonus
• Equity