Staff Software Engineer, Privacy

The Community You Will Join:

Join the Privacy team at Airbnb to enhance transparency, empower our global community, and build user trust through strong data privacy protections. The Privacy Engineering team is at the forefront of building cutting-edge technologies to protect user data and ensure compliance with global privacy regulations. We design and implement scalable privacy solutions that empower product teams to innovate while upholding the highest standards of data privacy. Our team works with design, product, legal, operations, security, infrastructure and other engineering teams to ensure that user data is protected and privacy standards are upheld, fostering a safer and more trustworthy Airbnb community. If you're passionate about building privacy-first architectures for large-scale distributed systems, this team is the place to make a real impact! 

What problems are we solving on Privacy?

At the Privacy Engineering team, we tackle some of the most complex challenges in data protection, privacy compliance, and user trust at scale. As privacy regulations evolve and AI-driven technologies advance, we are building cutting-edge solutions to ensure data protection and compliance measures at the core of Airbnb’s infrastructure.

Data Classification & Compliance at Scale

Handling massive amounts of user data across complex, evolving systems requires robust data classification, governance, and access control mechanisms. We develop scalable systems to automate data tagging, enforce retention policies, and detect policy violations in real time, ensuring compliance without slowing down innovation.

Preserving AI/ML Privacy

The Privacy Engineering team ensures user control and regulatory compliance over data that is used in GAI and LLM models through personal data detection, deidentification, anonymization & redaction. We are building an end-to-end privacy framework for preserving privacy in Generative AI and LLM models, integrating data infrastructure, privacy controls & safeguards, and ML workflows to embed privacy at every stage, from data collection to model deployment to user interactions.

User Consent & Data Subject Rights

We empower users with fine-grained control over their data, ensuring they can easily manage consent, preferences, and opt-outs. We are scaling automated workflows for data access, deletion, and rectification requests under frameworks like GDPR and CCPA, integrating them seamlessly across our distributed infrastructure.

The Difference You Will Make:

Your day-to-day responsibilities includes:

• 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.

Your Expertise:

Education & Experience:

• 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

Leadership & Collaboration:

• 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

Privacy Experience:

• 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

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.