Staff Software Engineer, Authorization

Airbnb is a leading hospitality company that connects hosts and guests for unique stays and experiences. They are seeking a Staff Software Engineer for their Authorization Infrastructure team to own the technical strategy and architectural direction of the authorization platform, ensuring it supports AI-era patterns and maintains high reliability and security standards.

Responsibilities:

• Lead the design, development, and evolution of Airbnb’s authorization platform, shaping roadmap, architecture, and delivery while ensuring high reliability, performance, and operational excellence at scale
• Help drive the next generation of authorization for AI and agentic workflows, defining clear access models for agents and building systems that enforce correctness, least-privilege access, and end-to-end auditability
• Partner with InfoSec, AI/ML Infra, Product, Privacy, and Data teams to align on authorization standards and drive adoption across the platform. This includes integrating authorization deeply into data access paths, improving correctness, coverage, and developer experience across the platform
• Lead design and execution of high-impact, high-risk authorization initiatives across multiple teams and systems
• Set and uphold engineering standards through design reviews, technical leadership, and mentorship of senior engineers

Requirements:

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, with significant time designing and operating large-scale, high-reliability distributed systems
• Deep expertise in authorization, access control, or identity systems, including policy models, permission frameworks, or trust infrastructure at production scale
• Demonstrated track record of owning complex, cross-organizational technical strategy: authoring foundational RFCs, building alignment across teams with competing priorities, and making high-stakes architectural commitments
• Experience influencing engineering standards beyond your immediate team, at the engineering council, org-wide, or across platform and product organizations
• Strong communication and technical leadership skills, with the ability to engage effectively across engineering, security, product leadership, and external partners
• Familiarity with AI agent architectures and the security and authorization challenges they introduce is a strong plus