Staff Software Engineer, Trust Membership (Trust)

Job Description

What is Trust at Airbnb?

Airbnb is built on trust. Over two million people stay on Airbnb every night and the Trust Engineering team keeps our hosts and guests safe and supported throughout the entire Airbnb experience. We’re creating new relationships & placing people in vulnerable situations. Therefore trust is the fundamental currency of Airbnb. The Trust team builds trust by creating safety at every stage of the journey from the moment the user visits Airbnb. We set the standards & expectations for our community, keep bad actors out and and build products for good users to thrive without getting caught in the net.

We constantly work to fight against online fraud (such as chargebacks, compromised accounts, spam and scam in messages, fake inventory, etc.) as well as offline fraud (theft, property damage, personal safety, etc.). We work on onboarding and making accounts secure, and think about complex topics like identity and reputation to ensure that every interaction with Airbnb helps build trust in us and our community. Trust Engineering is responsible for the technology vision and development of a complex stack that runs on every key interaction on the platform.

About the Membership Team on Trust

Membership Engineering is a team within the Trust organization that focuses on building solutions to help onboard and authenticate users onto the Airbnb platform while also making sure our existing community of guests and hosts remain safe on the platform. We are constantly working on adding innovative and secure ways for users to onboard and easily authenticate like MFA, Passwordless methods, and Web Authentication while seamlessly transitioning existing users to these new methods. The products the Membership team creates has a huge impact on the experience of every user on Airbnb.

What is a Software Engineer on the Membership team?

As an engineer on the Membership team, you help provide a seamless signup/login experience for Airbnb users in order to grow good users while keeping out bad actors to ensure the accounts are secure. You are eager to understand complex systems end to end and thrive working across technologies and codebases. Your contributions take a variety of shapes:

• Architecting powerful yet seamless end-to-end user products to keep Airbnb community safe
• Building a long-term technology stack with well defined APIs that is service-oriented, modular, granular, observable, and efficient
• Incorporating scalable, real-time risk detection into Airbnb services
• Working with cross-functional teams with design, product, data science, and research partners to drive engineering decisions

Projects:

• Create products to deter and defend against account fraud with more secure yet seamless ways of onboarding and authentication like using biometrics, Web Authentication, and passwordless methods with one time code login. Our work has had a major impact in increasing signup/login success rates, revenue, and reducing account takeovers.
• Re-architect the authentication backend with well-designed abstractions as the ways to onboard and authenticate expands, and maintain high systems quality including latency, reliability, and availability.
• Revamp the signup/login logging and metrics, one of the key Airbnb business indicators, to incorporate new signals for how users interact at the top of the funnel so we can more effectively and accurately identify ways to improve our onboarding user journey.
• Improve the experience of account management, such as end-to-end API redesigns of the account settings page and reset password flow, as well as the user education process during onboarding.
• Work on a company wide initiative across teams to incorporate signup during the booking checkout flow to reduce the number of steps new users need for booking.

Requirements:

• 8+ years of industry experience
• Experience with Java / Ruby is preferred, especially with Rails and Kubernetes services
• Ability to write high performance production quality code
• Passion for delivering products end-to-end, from ideation through planning and scoping to implementation and experimental A/B testing
• Exposure to architectural patterns of large, high-scale web applications, such as well-designed APIs, high volume data pipelines, and efficient algorithms
• Experience or desire to work collaboratively in cross-functional teams with design, product, data science, operations, and research partners