Software Engineer, Payments

Airbnb was born in 2007 when two Hosts welcomed three guests to their San Francisco home, and has since grown to over 4 million Hosts who have welcomed more than 1 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

Payments is key for any healthy marketplace, and is just as central to our product at Airbnb. The Payments org at Airbnb is responsible for everything related to settling money in Airbnb’s global marketplace. We build technology that powers Airbnb’s massive daily transaction volume to collect payments from guests, distribute payouts to hosts and everything in between. Our goal is to make the Payment experience on Airbnb as delightful, magical, intuitive, and easy as possible.

The Difference You Will Make

Business Platform & Solutions (BPS) is a payments engineering org with the vision to make payments easy and delightful for everyone. We are a full stack geo-distributed team focusing on building extensible platforms and scalable solutions to empower Airbnb businesses, communities, and payments innovations both globally and locally. We are looking for a self-motivated tech lead who is interested in working in a highly dynamic environment by collaborating with cross-functional and cross-site teams. As a software engineer, you are in charge of coming up with creative solutions at scale using skills including distributed systems, data processing pipelines, real-time system and payments technologies. The team is transforming how payments enable business as a platform in a multi-year effort, we have the following major technical challenges:

Payments Facade: As Airbnb next generation Payments APIs, Payments Facade is the single payments interface for ALL product teams to integrate with payments, aiming to provide seamless payments integration. It provides highly simplified APIs with intuitive schema and manages all payments internal orchestrations across systems.

Business Launchpad: business integration and onboarding to the payments system is complex, causing multiple pain points to both business/platform teams as well as payments teams: 1) complicated integration touchpoints; 2) large efforts with long development periods; 3) business customizations compromise core payments systems quality and maintainability, etc. We’re building this business platform to significantly simplify the business payments integrations and provide seamless onboarding experience to all businesses. It’s one of the most critical architecture domains in the payments systems.

Unified Payments Data: Payments systems and data are very complex. Payments data are scattered among tens of services. The Payments system lacks an aggregation layer to construct the data ready to be consumed by clients. Each client needs to fetch data from multiple payments services and duplicate the aggregation logic on their own. It is challenging for clients to discover the right source-of-truth. In addition, Payments data models are highly normalized, getting aggregated data would require joining multiple db tables and is very expensive. Payments Unified Data Read provides a unified architecture for clients to efficiently and performantly access payments data through unified interface and read optimized store. Read more in this blog post: https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering/unified-payments-data-read-at-airbnb-e613e7af1a39

Multi Item Checkout Platform: our current architecture is limited to a single item checkout and payments. Multi-item checkout platform (MICP) is the underlying platform capability that enables multiple offerings on the checkout flow and provides guests with an optimized end-to-end purchase experience. In addition, MICP also provides hosts the ability to upsell value added services and enables Airbnb to offer additional products. MICP fundamentally changes the core paradigm from a single checkout limited architecture to a multi-item checkout platform that offers scalability and flexibility and provides significant value for our communities.

A Typical Day

• Build payments solutions for Airbnb new businesses and products
• Contribute to design and build our major technology transformation (see challenges above)
• Craft pragmatic solutions and be the bar raiser for quality and extensibility
• Amplify team impact through leadership and collaborations

Your Expertise

• Proven ability to execute on major engineering projects with a high quality bar; ability to execute projects from start to finish
• Proficient in any of the following programming languages: C/C++, Java, C#, Python/Django, Ruby/Ruby on Rails
• Problem solving: Ability to evaluate technical approaches and tradeoffs
• Communication: Ability to clearly and effectively communicate with stakeholders verbally and in writing
• Strong project scoping and project management skills
• BS in Computer Science or equivalent work-related experience

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. . 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: [email protected]. 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.