Senior Software Engineer

About the Job:
Airbnb, a company born from a vision of authentic connection, is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to join its Payments AI/ML Foundation team in Bengaluru, Karnataka, India. This team is instrumental in building the shared platforms, services, and guardrails that empower product and data teams across Airbnb Payments to deploy trustworthy, efficient, and scalable AI capabilities. We provide the foundational infrastructure for model training, evaluation, inference, and operations, covering the entire model lifecycle, observability, governance, cost/latency optimization, and developer ergonomics. Our goal is to enable Payments teams to innovate rapidly in the AI space with confidence.

Your Impact:
As a Senior Software Engineer on the Payments AI/ML Foundation team, you will be responsible for designing and owning critical platform components that underpin AI initiatives throughout Airbnb Payments. You will collaborate closely with product managers, infrastructure teams, data scientists, and operations specialists to translate complex, ambiguous requirements into robust systems with well-defined Service Level Agreements (SLAs). Your work will involve building tooling and automation to enhance the safety and speed of AI development, while continuously improving the reliability, performance, and governance of AI models and agents in production.

A Typical Day Might Include:

• Envisioning, championing, and supporting the development of innovative ML systems, product integrations, and performance enhancements to address real-world challenges.
• Collaborating with cross-functional partners including software engineers, product managers, operations teams, and data scientists to identify business impact opportunities.
• Understanding, refining, and prioritizing requirements for AI/ML models.
• Driving key engineering decisions and quantifying their impact.
• Hands-on productionization and operation of AI/ML solutions and pipelines at scale, supporting both batch and real-time use cases.
• Leading, mentoring, challenging, and nurturing a collaborative and enthusiastic AI/ML culture within the organization.

Your Expertise:

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 7+ years of industry experience in backend or platform engineering, with a proven track record of owning production systems.
• Strong programming proficiency in Python and solid foundations in data engineering.
• Desirable experience with AI frameworks (e.g., Langraph, Strand), orchestration tools (e.g., Airflow, Kubeflow), and streaming/processing technologies (e.g., Kafka, Spark, Ray).
• Demonstrated success in building observability for AI systems, including metrics, logging, tracing, automated alerting, dashboards, and SLO management.
• Experience designing and implementing model governance and safety guardrails, such as prompt/version control, red-teaming, policy checks, and approval workflows.
• Proven ability to drive performance and cost optimizations (e.g., profiling, batching, caching, quantization, autoscaling) in high-traffic environments.
• Practical familiarity with vector search and embedding pipelines, including indexing strategies, consistency management, reindexing, and retention policies.

Our Commitment to Inclusion & Belonging:
Airbnb is dedicated to building the most diverse talent pool possible. We believe that a variety of ideas fuels innovation and engagement, enabling us to attract creative individuals and develop superior products, services, and solutions. All qualified applicants are strongly encouraged to apply.