Staff Data Scientist - Algorithms, Payments

Airbnb is a mission-driven company dedicated to helping create a world where anyone can belong anywhere. It takes a unified team committed to our core values to achieve this goal. Airbnb's various functions embody the company's innovative spirit and our fast-moving team is committed to leading as a 21st century company.

About the Team

Airbnb has become a platform that connects travelers and hosts from over 81,000 cities around the globe. To power that community, Airbnb is building a world-class payments platform that currently supports over 190 countries, 70+ currencies, connects dozens of payment providers, and transmits billions of dollars per year.

Our responsibility? Enable safe payments and meet financial regulations. That means knowing who is paying and getting paid, preventing financial crimes, and generally contributing to a healthy global financial ecosystem.

We have a strong team of data scientists, who generate tremendous business impact. If you have a proven background in fraud prevention and are excited to help Airbnb build a trustful and reliable community, we want to hear from you.

Some of the challenges you will face include:

• Building machine learning models to detect fraud activities and ensure financial compliance.
• Building ML performance framework to ensure system performance and add system transparency in the adversarial setup.
• Strong data driven approach to understand and improve our payment ecosystem. That includes but not limited to:
  • Defining and evaluating key metrics for systems
  • Ownership of conceptualizing and interpreting system and ecosystem changes.
  • Investigating evolving fraud trends to extract patterns, generate data insights and actionable system changes.
• Communicating data insights and recommending solutions to cross functional stakeholders.
• Empowering the team to provide data driven answers and solutions by mitigating tech gaps.

Here are example traits we value:

• Advanced degree in Computer Science, Math, Statistics and other related fields. PhD is a plus.
• 8+ years of industry experience related to data science, developing machine learning models at scale, data analytics, and experimentation design.
• Deep understanding of modern machine learning techniques and their mathematical underpinnings, such as classification, clustering, optimization, deep neural network and natural language processing.
• Experience in Data Query and analysis. Experience in SQL.
• Strong programming skills (Python, R, Java, C++, PHP Preferred).
• Ability to communicate clearly and effectively to cross functional partners of varying technical levels.
• Ability to define relevant metrics that can guide and influence stakeholders to the appropriate and accurate insights.
• Data ETL experience is a plus (Hive, Presto, Spark preferred).

We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status