Payments Strategy Analyst jobs at Airbnb

The Community You Will Join:

Our Payments product organization has 2 domains:

• Payments and Commerce Platform - facilitating money movement and exchange of value while also fueling growth for our business
• Payments Risk and Compliance - ensuring safe and efficient payment processing

A Typical Day:

• Champion the vision for a world-class guest payins experience and processing on the Payments Platform
• Shape and execute a thoughtful, multi-year roadmap to make paying as seamless and delightful as staying at an Airbnb
• Partner closely with talented teammates across Engineering, Operations, Analytics, Partnerships, Treasury, Finance, Platform, Product Marketing, and UX Design, aligning on goals and turning big ideas into reality
• Craft clear product narratives, user stories, and requirements that keep teams inspired and focused
• Launch experiments, define meaningful success metrics, and plan smooth rollouts that scale
• Define, monitor and analyze KPIs that inform payment success & health
• Lead the way in integrating partner products and services that elevate what platform intelligence and efficiency
• Collaborate to build actionable playbooks for solving guest payment challenges and supporting our global community
• Stay curious and connected to the latest in payments, bringing fresh ideas, best practices, and innovations to Airbnb

Your Expertise:

• 7+ years of product management experience, launching new payment methods or partner integrations across the payments ecosystem (including gateways, PSPs, networks, issuers, and acquirers)
• Deep platform payments product management know-how, building flexible products that empower a range of business customers
• Framework oriented thinker
• Hands-on collaboration with engineers, developing use cases, building inspiring narratives, prioritizing features, and making thoughtful trade-offs between short-term and long-term bets
• Proven ability to lead through influence, working cross-functionally with engineers, data scientists, finance, compliance, legal, and business partners
• Clear, compelling storyteller, confident sharing both the “why” behind your vision and digging into the details when needed
• Strong decision-making chops: skilled at prioritizing and navigating resource constraints to deliver maximum impact
• Comfortable in a startup-like environment, embracing pace, change, and ambiguity with positivity and resilience
• Highly data-driven, with robust analytical skills and a passion for using insights to drive great outcomes

Domain Experience:

• Transaction Processing: Deep experience with real-time and batch processing, payment routing, and failover strategies across global PSPs
• Transaction Orchestration: Experience managing Cardholder Initiated Transactions (CIT), Merchant Initiated Transactions (MIT), incremental/capture flows, partial authorizations, and scheduled billing and smart retries
• Payment Retry & Optimization: Implementing intelligent retry logic, dynamic routing, and decline code analysis to maximize acceptance rates
• Authentication: Experience implementing SCA and 3DS2
• Partner tools: Experience leveraging network tools (e.g. Network Tokens, Account Updater) and PSP capabilities to drive approvals
• Alternative Payment Methods: Integrating global/local payment rails (e.g., digital wallets, open banking, instant payments)
• Settlement & Reconciliation: Experience with multi-currency settlement, reconciliation workflows, and chargeback handling
• Payment UX: experience optimizing multi-device, multi-currency payment flows a plus
• Knowledge and experience using collaborative tools and techniques of the trade (e.g. Airtable, SQL, Google Docs, Scrum, Agile, Figma, Invision)

Offices: United States

The Difference You Will Make:

As a Senior Benefits Analyst, you will be responsible for supporting the management of Airbnb’s medical, dental, vision, life, and disability programs for the US. You will assist in reviewing the design and implementation of benefit programs, communicating with benefit program vendors and managing vendor relationships, developing and interpreting benefit plan policies, analyzing market data for benefit program competitiveness, and ensuring compliance of benefit programs. You will be a critical part of the open enrollment process for the US. You will be part of the Benefits team within Total Rewards, and report to the Senior Benefits Manager of the Americas. You will also work closely with Benefit Program managers and cross functional teams.

A Typical Day:

• Provide benefits related guidance and support to employees through their lifecycle (i.e. onboarding, enrollment changes, life events, program changes, offboarding)
• Serve as the principal point of contact for employee inquiries and escalations from the Service Desk and independently respond to such inquiries by analyzing and interpreting various benefit plan policies to arrive at recommended responses
• Develop and conduct presentations to help educate new hires and employees about benefit programs
• Design and create communication materials with the team, including compliance documents (5500s, SPDs, SARs), open enrollment communications, and benefit policy changes
• Develop workflows, business processes, and perform testing of Workday and other data systems to support vendor changes, benefit program changes, and employee enrollment windows
• Compile, analyze and develop reports of basic benefit data information for purposes of strategic planning and program evaluation
• Create and maintain standard operating procedures/business processes for operational team to execute
• Support the tracking of health and welfare costs, budgeting and trends including creating requisitions for purchase orders and processing invoices
• Assist with research related to benefit program benchmarking and competitiveness, including developing data and reports to be used to benchmark Airbnb benefit programs; and analyzing benchmarking results together with program managers to develop benefit program recommendations.
• Ensure compliance of benefit processes and policies
• Act as point of contact for benefit vendors and partners to ensure benefit program delivery
• Participate in the review and evaluation of benefit vendors to ensure best in class service and performance
• Review and audit benefits bills for accuracy and to ensure timely payment. Correspond with vendors and internal accounts payable and finance team to resolve discrepancies
• Work on special global benefits administration and projects as needed
• Assist with audits to ensure accuracy of data in reports and data transmissions to third party vendors; collaborate with business systems counterparts for assessment and correction of discrepancies

Your Expertise:

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience
• Minimum four years of experience supporting health and welfare programs for a company with a global workforce
• Strong organizational, multi-tasking, project management and analytical skills and the ability to liaise with all levels of the organization
• Strong team player willing to coach and mentor more junior team members
• Excellent verbal and written communication and interpersonal skills and customer service
• Ability to work with highly confidential information
• Demonstrates diligence, strong initiative and is self-managed
• Intellectually curious and exhibits strong critical thinking and problem-solving skills
• Experience with benefits administration in mergers and acquisitions a plus
• Proficiency with HR systems, preferably Workday, Jira, and Excel
• Experience working in teams, with an aptitude for learning and sharing knowledge with others
• Passionate about providing our employees with a stellar benefits experience during every step of their lifecycle
• Thrives in a fast-paced, high growth environment

Offices: United States

A Typical Day:

• Serve as a subject matter expert on global payments (Card Networks, Acquirers, Processors, Payment Methods);
• Analyze and understand Airbnb’s total cost of payments including the composition of costs. Lead payment auth improvement and performance initiatives across various Airbnb markets
• Work with analytics, finance, and operations teams to provide actionable insights and performance reports.
• Develop strategies to drive strategic outcomes with partners within the payments ecosystem (banks, networks, processors, fintechs etc) to support processing needs, drive user acquisition and new bookings, and lower payments processing costs
• Maintain a strong working knowledge of card network rules (e.g. Visa, Mastercard, Amex, Discover) and ensure partner compliance with those standards.
• Manage day-to-day relationships with a portfolio of payment partners (e.g. payment processors, acquirers, networks, PSPs).
• Serve as the primary liaison for partner communications, ensuring alignment on operational and strategic goals.
• Support regular business reviews with partners, including performance updates, issue tracking, and roadmap discussions.
• Escalate and coordinate resolution of partner issues by working cross-functionally with internal teams (e.g. platform product, operations, customer support, etc.).
• Identify opportunities to expand or enhance payment capabilities through new or existing partnerships.
• Contribute to market research and partner assessments to support decision-making around new integrations or services.
• Lead negotiations and execution of commercial agreements in collaboration with senior stakeholders and legal teams.
• Monitor industry trends and competitor partnerships to inform internal strategy.
• Lead partner coordination during operational incidents, service disruptions, or degraded performance.
• Partner alongside technical and operational teams to perform root cause analysis and define preventive actions, particularly where there are partner implications.
• Act as the connector between external partners and internal stakeholders across product, engineering, finance, and operations.
• Provide partner insights to influence product development and operational planning.
• Participate in cross-functional projects to launch new payment features, geographies, or customer experiences.

Your Expertise:

• 10+ years of experience in Payments Industry with specific focus on partnerships, product or consulting
• Experience in integrating large scale processing platforms and global payment methods
• Knowledge of card and non-card payments ecosystem
• Proven analytical skills, particularly in the realm of payments cost drivers and approval optimization
• History of interacting with stakeholders across the payments value chain, including issuers, acquirers, networks, fraud and risk management providers
• Comfortable driving partner discussions and negotiations to drive payments economics and product performance
• Excellent communication skills and attention to detail, and ability to communicate complex details simply
• Detail-oriented with great organizational skills, and highly analytical, but also comfortable with ambiguity
• Entrepreneurial and comfortable working in a fast-paced environment with the ability to thrive under minimal guidance

Offices: United States

A Typical Day:

• Architect and implement complex features, focusing on data-driven decision making and performance optimizations.
• Collaborate with other engineers and cross-functional partners across the organization to understand and prioritize technical requirements.
• Proactively grow knowledge of leading edge practices and trends involving workflow orchestration systems.
• Help define and improve coding standards, development processes and best practices.

Your Expertise:

• 3+ years of experience in a hands-on full-stack engineering role building large-scale consumer-facing products.
• Bachelor’s and/or Master/PhD’s degree, preferably in CS, or equivalent experience.
• Fluency in frontend web technologies (e.g. Javascript/Typescript, React, Node.js, CSS and Graphql etc)
• Exposure to Java and/or Kotlin.
• Demonstrated expertise in backend systems within large-scale service-oriented architectures.
• Passionate about efficiency, availability, technical quality and system quality.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills and the ability to work well within engineering organization and cross functions.

Offices: United States

The Difference You Will Make:

As a Staff ML Engineer for Payments, you will be the catalyst that transforms bold AI innovation — LLM-powered workflow, real-time fraud defenses, and hyper-personalized checkout flows — into production systems that make Airbnb Payment experience feel effortless and secure; you’ll architect and own end-to-end solutions at global scale, partner closely with product, software, and operations teams to turn complex requirements into elegant, latency-first services, and set the technical standard for model governance, continuous learning, and engineering excellence that elevates our entire payments ecosystem while shaping the company’s broader AI strategy.

A Typical Day:

• Spearhead LLM agents, real-time 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.
  

Your Expertise:

• 9+ 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.
• Hands-on experience with at least three of the following: PyTorch/TensorFlow , scalable inference stacks (Triton, vLLM), vector search, orchestration/MLOps platforms (Kubeflow, Airflow), large-scale data streaming & processing (Spark, Ray, Kafka).
• Demonstrated success designing, deploying, and monitoring production AI systems—e.g., RAG pipelines, personalization engines, generative content services—complete with drift/cost/latency monitoring, automated re-training triggers, and cross-functional collaboration that translates ambiguous business needs into measurable AI impact.
• Prior knowledge of AI/ML Applications in the Payments domain is highly desirable
  

Offices: United States

A Typical Day:

As a Senior Software Engineer on the Payments Transaction team, you will:

• Work on multi-team technical initiatives, and work cross-functionally to identify opportunities for business impact, refine, and prioritize requirements for engineering systems.
• Architect and implement complex features, focusing on data-driven decision making and performance optimizations.
• Work with other engineering teams to advance Airbnb’s engineering processes and technical foundations
• Work on systemic improvements by identifying patterns to streamline development, reduce toil and increase technical quality and operational excellence over time.
• Mentor and provide technical guidance to junior engineers through design reviews, code walkthroughs, and knowledge-sharing sessions, fostering a culture of knowledge sharing and continuous learning.

Your Expertise :

• 5+ years of experience in a hands-on software engineering role.
• 1+ years of relevant industry experience (Payments/Fintech) as a backend software engineer is plus.
• Experience leading design, implementation, and deployment of one or more high scale, cross-functional payment systems.
• Bachelor’s and/or Master’s degree, preferably in CS, or equivalent experience
• Technical leadership: hands on experience leading project teams, setting technical direction and strategy and mentoring engineers.
• Passionate about efficiency, availability, technical quality and system quality.
• Passion to level-up those around you through curiosity and fostering a collaborative and inclusive team environment.
• Proven experience in defining product/technical strategy and driving alignment with cross-functional leaders and stakeholders.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills with experience driving initiatives that span across teams, departments and leadership.

Offices: United States

A Typical Day:

• Build backend services and APIs to create scalable engineering systems
• Work with data scientists, business analysts and operations to define, capture, and use real-time event data for business insights and product feature
• Collaborate with infrastructure engineering teams to participate in, validate, and evolve how we build, test, and deploy code in a distributed Service-Oriented Architecture
• Alter existing and develop new data access and protection patterns to ensure our community’s personal data is safe and secure, at scale

Your Expertise:

• 5-9+ years of industry experiences
• Backend or Full-Stack experience in a work-setting.
• Require extensive experience working with Java in a distributed micro service environment.
• Evidence of exposure to architectural patterns of a large, high-scale web application (e.g., well-designed APIs, high volume data pipelines, efficient algorithms)
• Understanding of data structures and problem solving approaches, and ability to articulate trade offs
• Passion for creating highly effective technology platform for our growing global workforce
• Experience with Agile development
• Be future looking; we might be focused on immediate regulations, but need to
  build for the long term
• Comfortable with tackling ambiguous problems and unblocking yourself
• Focus on building high quality products; every one of our flows affects the
  business bottom line
• Data driven in how you solve problems and validate you've solved them correctly
• Have a strong desire to mentor the careers and development of other engineers
• Possesses strong verbal and written communication skills.
• BS in Computer Science / MIS or equivalent work-related experience

Offices: United States