---
title: 'Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Trust at Airbnb'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/senior-machine-learning-engineer-trust-airbnb-san-francisco-12wbdtrm4hd5'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-10-14'
---

# Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Trust at Airbnb

- **Company:** Airbnb
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Compensation:** $200k–$227k
- **Posted:** 2026-08-14
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-14
- **Apply:** https://careers.airbnb.com/positions/8130355?gh_jid=8130355

## Job description

Airbnb was born in 2007 when two hosts welcomed three guests to their San Francisco home, and has since grown to over 5 million hosts who have welcomed over 2 billion guest arrivals in almost every country across the globe. Every day, hosts offer unique stays and experiences that make it possible for guests to connect with communities in a more authentic way.

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.

Your Expertise:

- 5-10 years of industry experience in applied Machine Learning, with a track record of building and productionizing models at scale.
- 1-2+ years of hands-on experience with LLMs and GenAI technologies, including building with agentic frameworks, orchestration, and evaluation.
- Strong programming skills in Python (required) and familiarity with Scala, Java, or equivalent.
- Solid understanding of Machine Learning best practices — e.g., training/serving skew minimization, A/B testing, feature engineering, model selection — and algorithms such as gradient boosted trees, neural networks, transformers, and deep learning.
- Experience with ML frameworks and tooling such as TensorFlow, PyTorch, or equivalent.
- Experience with data engineering and building end-to-end ML pipelines, including both batch and real-time systems.
- Experience designing evaluation methodology for ML or LLM systems — benchmarks, ground truth, offline/online metrics, calibration.
- Comfort with ambiguity and a bias toward action: you can take a loosely defined problem, scope it, prototype quickly, and drive it to a measurable outcome.
- Exposure to architectural patterns of large, high-scale software applications (e.g., well-designed APIs, high-volume data pipelines, efficient algorithms).
- Experience with test-driven development, incremental delivery, and deployment practices.
- Experience with multimodal models (vision, document, or speech) is a plus.
- Exposure to the Trust and Risk domain (e.g., fraud detection, anomaly detection, identity, account integrity) is a plus.
- A Bachelor's, Master's, or PhD in CS/ML or a related field.

Your Location:

This position is US - Remote Eligible. The role may include occasional work at an Airbnb office or attendance at offsites, as agreed to with your manager. While the position is Remote Eligible, you must live in a state where Airbnb, Inc. has a registered entity. [Click here for the up-to-date list of excluded states.](https://careers.airbnb.com/) This list is continuously evolving, so please check back with us if the state you live in is on the exclusion list. If your position is employed by another Airbnb entity, your recruiter will inform you what states you are eligible to work from.

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—$227,000 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](http://airbnb.com) or @[ext.airbnb.com](http://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.

## About Airbnb

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Airbnb operates a global marketplace for unique stays, experiences, and adventures, connecting hosts with travelers.
- **Entity Type**: Public (NASDAQ: ABNB)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, United States
- **Founded**: 2007
- **Founders**: Brian Chesky, Joe Gebbia, Nathan Blecharczyk

## Core Business
- **Primary industry/industries**: Online Travel & Hospitality, Software Development
- **Target customers**: B2C (travelers), C2C (hosts), with some B2B (Airbnb for Work, business travel)
- **Mission or purpose statement**: To create a world where anyone can belong anywhere, providing unique travel experiences and economic opportunity for hosts.

## Products & Services
- **Airbnb Stays**: The core platform for booking short-term rentals (entire homes, private rooms, shared spaces) in over 220 countries and regions.
- **Airbnb Experiences**: Curated, hands-on activities hosted by locals (e.g., cooking classes, guided hikes, workshops).
- **Airbnb Adventures**: Multi-day, small-group immersive trips led by local experts.
- **Airbnb for Work**: A service for companies to manage business travel and team retreats.
- **Luxe**: A premium tier offering vetted, high-end vacation homes with dedicated trip designers.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: ~$77.8B (as of recent data)
- **Key Metric**: Annual Revenue of $12.2B (based on available data)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Founders Fund, Y Combinator
- **Growth Signals**: 
  - **From 2007 to present**: 1.5 billion guest arrivals globally.
  - **Headcount Growth**: Employs ~21,644 people, a **+30.6% year-over-year increase**.
  - **Global Reach**: Operates in 176 countries with a strong international team (e.g., offices/employees in India, Italy, Canada, Brazil, UK, Australia, China).
  - **Public Company Status**: IPO in 2020, trading on NASDAQ.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Network Effects**: A massive, global two-sided network of 5 million+ hosts and 1.5 billion arrivals creates a formidable moat that is very difficult for competitors to replicate.
- **Brand & Trust**: A globally recognized brand synonymous with alternative accommodations and travel experiences.
- **Liquidity & Inventory**: Unrivaled inventory depth across 220+ countries, offering unique stays not found in traditional hotels.
- **Live and Work Anywhere Policy**: A radical shift in work culture that offers flexibility and a competitive edge in talent acquisition, allowing employees to live anywhere in their country of employment with no compensation change.

## Strategic Focus
- **International & Mainstream Expansion**: Continuing to grow its user base beyond early adopters into mainstream travel and new international markets.
- **Product Diversification**: Pushing hard into "Experiences" and "Adventures" to reduce reliance on accommodations and capture more of the travel wallet.
- **Leveraging AI & Technology**: Investing in AI (e.g., AI Engineer roles in Community Support) to improve the guest and host experience, search, and trust & safety.
- **Return to Travel & "Live Anywhere"**: Capitalizing on the post-pandemic shift towards remote work and long-term stays with its "Live and Work Anywhere" initiative.

## Why Work Here
- **Flexibility**: A ground-breaking **"Live and Work Anywhere"** policy. Employees can work from home, an office, or temporarily anywhere in the world (with approval). Compensation is not changed when moving within their country of employment.
- **Compelling Mission**: An opportunity to work on a platform that creates connection and economic empowerment for millions of people globally.
- **Diversity & Belonging**: Strong commitment to inclusion with numerous Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) such as Able@, Black@, Women@, Parents@, and many more.
- **Great Benefits**: 
  - **Travel Credit**: Quarterly Airbnb travel and experiences credit.
  - **Education**: Annual educational stipend.
  - **Wellbeing**: Subsidized healthcare, mental health support, family care support, and generous parental leave.
  - **Equity**: Competitive compensation including equity and an Employee Stock Purchase Program (ESPP).
- **Culture**: Values-driven with a focus on "Be a Host" (caring, open, encouraging), "Champion the Mission," and "Embrace the Adventure."
- **Work Model**: Supports a mix of remote, hybrid (be close to an office), and onsite work, giving employees significant control over their schedule.
- **Talent Community**: A highly creative and collaborative environment with industry-leading talent.

## Sources
1. [careers.airbnb.com](https://careers.airbnb.com/)
2. [careers.airbnb.com/life-at-airbnb/](https://careers.airbnb.com/life-at-airbnb/)
3. [airbnb.com](https://www.airbnb.com/)
4. [linkedin.com/company/airbnb](https://sg.linkedin.com/company/airbnb)
5. [careers.airbnb.com/positions/](https://careers.airbnb.com/positions/)

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