Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Payments

Airbnb operates a global marketplace for stays and experiences. The Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Payments will transform AI and machine learning innovations into secure, reliable production systems for payments, including fraud prevention, personalization, and LLM-powered workflows. The role will lead end-to-end architecture, deployment, monitoring, and continuous improvement while collaborating with product, engineering, operations, and data science teams.

Responsibilities:

• Spearhead LLM agents, realtime anomaly detectors, and other breakthrough solutions that solve real-world problems and create product magic
• Collaborate with product, engineering, ops, and data science to spot high leverage opportunities, refine AI/ML requirements, make principled architecture choices, and measure business value with clear, data-driven metrics
• Design, train, deploy, and operate large-scale AI applications for both batch and streaming workloads, ensuring low latency, high reliability, and continuous improvement via automated monitoring and retraining loops
• Mentor and inspire teammates, fostering a collaborative, experimentation-driven environment where cutting edge research meets production excellence and every engineer is empowered to push AI boundaries at Airbnb

Requirements:

• 5+ years of industry experience in applied AI/ML, inclusive MS or PhD in relevant fields
• Strong programming (Python/Java) and data engineering skills
• Proven mastery of modern AI/LLM workflows — prompt engineering, fine tuning (LoRA, RLHF), hallucination mitigation, safety guardrails, and rigorous online/offline testing to minimize training/inference drift and ensure reliable outcomes
• Handson experience with at least three of the following: PyTorch/TensorFlow , scalable inference stacks, vector search, orchestration/MLOps platforms (Kubeflow, Airflow), largescale data streaming & processing (Spark, Ray, Kafka)
• Prior knowledge of AI/ML Applications in the Payments domain is highly desirable