Staff Software Engineer

Summary

Join Airbnb's Privacy team and contribute to enhancing transparency, empowering the global community, and building user trust through robust data privacy protections. The Privacy Engineering team develops cutting-edge technologies to safeguard user data and ensure compliance with global regulations. You will be responsible for providing thought leadership, leading technical initiatives, collaborating with cross-functional teams, and designing and building privacy infrastructure, particularly for AI/ML. This role requires extensive experience in software engineering, a strong understanding of privacy regulations, and proven leadership skills. The position is US-remote eligible with occasional office work. Compensation includes a competitive salary, bonus, equity, benefits, and employee travel credits.

Requirements

• BS/MS/PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning or a related field (or equivalent industry experience)
• 10+ years of experience in software engineering in a fast-paced tech environment
• Strong programming skills (Java / Scala / Python / C++ or equivalent) with deep expertise in architectural patterns and designing scalable, fault-tolerant distributed systems in a service-oriented architecture
• Proven experience partnering with cross-functional leaders to define product/technical strategy and drive alignment
• Experience leading large-scale, multi-team, multi-platform projects that require extensive collaboration, influencing and decision-making capabilities
• Strong technical leadership with the ability to mentor engineers and set technical direction for the team
• Desire to work collaboratively with cross-functional partners, such as design, product, data science, infrastructure, policy, operations, and legal partners
• Passion to level-up those around you through curiosity and fostering a collaborative and inclusive team environment
• Familiarity with AI/ML governance and ability to work with cross-functional teams to integrate privacy safeguards into AI/ML pipelines
• Experience with data anonymization, deidentification, synthetic data generation, and other privacy-preserving machine learning techniques
• Experience designing privacy-aware AI/ML models, ensuring compliance with GDPR, CCPA, and other regulatory frameworks
• Experience with data discovery, classification, and lineage

Responsibilities

• Provide thought leadership, define strategy, influence cross functional collaboration and drive architectural decisions to enable Privacy by Design into all engineering & product development processes at Airbnb
• Lead multi-team technical initiatives, and work cross-functionally to identify opportunities for business impact, refine, and prioritize requirements for engineering systems
• Work collaboratively with cross-functional partners including software & ML engineers, product partners, legal and privacy experts to integrate cutting-edge privacy safeguards into Airbnb’s AI/ML pipelines and data & service infrastructure. Your work will ensure compliance with regulatory frameworks while enabling responsible data practice and AI development at scale
• Design, prototype, and productionalize the next-generation privacy infrastructure, especially for AI/ML privacy protection measures
• Design and build foundational investments in data discovery, classification, purpose of processing mapping, lineage, usage, retention, policy enforcement, etc from a Privacy perspective, especially for AI/ML practices

Benefits

• Bonus
• Equity
• Benefits
• Employee Travel Credits