Senior Data Scientist - Payments (Inference) at Airbnb in Remote - USA

Job description

• Application
• You will join the Payments Data Science organization, which sits at the intersection of Trust and Payments and powers the systems that move money safely and efficiently across Airbnb's global marketplace. The team spans payment optimization for guests and hosts, fraud and risk mitigation, complex measurement, and regulatory compliance. We partner directly with Payments product and engineering leadership, Finance, and Trust to ensure every transaction is fast, safe, and compliant at global scale. Our work directly shapes decisions made by senior leaders, including Payments executive leadership, and requires a rigorous, evidence-based approach to every recommendation we make. Our Data Science team enables this mission by providing reliable measurement frameworks to deliver robust data insights, build and enable state-of-the-art data products/models, and provide actionable and reliable business guidance.
• We are looking for a passionate data scientist to lead quantitative measurement efforts and bring novel scientific approaches to drive decision making across our platform’s payment experience. This data scientist will perform careful hypothesis generation, causal inference framework development, and model development/evaluation to ideate and drive payment strategies on our platform. This role will have a particular focus on payments fraud mitigation and loss optimization, with the goal of making our platform safer for our community.
• Our Data Scientists have a deep understanding of causal framework development, statistical analysis, machine learning model development and evaluation strategies, and the complications of running experiment/quasi-experimental methods in a two-sided marketplace. They have keen business sense and are able to develop novel solutions to fraud and risk problems that don't have an established playbook and utilize their findings to communicate across a wide range of partners to drive our data & product roadmaps. They are not only the trusted data expert on their team, but also a storyteller.
• Examples of projects you may work on include, development of novel metrics and frameworks that can efficiently measure outcomes (often balancing competing tradeoffs), generating deep root cause investigations and long term impact measurements, and building/evaluating ML and agentic models to optimize guest, host, and business outcomes.

Responsibilities

• Inference: Develop and apply causal inference methods, including experimental, econometric regressions, and quasi-experimental methods to measure a wide-range of platform/product impacts.
• AI/ML: Build methods for robust evaluation of ML/AI model efficiency and performance. Ability to identify use-cases for and develop predictive models to classify, segment, and interpret our users’ behavior. Support evaluation and optimization of agentic and LLM-based systems.
• Optimization: Develop methodologies to explore/simulate the impact of new interventions and develop data products to optimize product/operational strategies.
• Communication: Deliver robust research reports and effective data visualizations. Collaborate with and present to stakeholders to identify opportunities and communicate findings, and drive impact.
• Empowerment: Think strategically about opportunities to improve and scale our brand measurement and customer insights.

Requirements

• 5+ years of industry experience in a quantitative analysis role with a Master’s degree in a quantitative field (math / economics / statistics, and etc.), or 3+ years of experience with a Phd degree.
• Strong knowledge of causal inference, experimentation, applied statistical modeling, and end-to-end ML development.
• Skilled in statistical programming (Python or R) and database usage (SQL)
• Demonstrated track record of owning a business or technical domain end-to-end at a prior company: setting your own roadmap, being the accountable expert others escalate to, and driving a problem to resolution.
• Proven ability to communicate clearly and effectively to audiences of varying technical levels
• Ability to work independently, set your own roadmap, and drive cross-functional alignment
• Payments Fraud/Risk Domain expertise is a strong plus.
• Familiarity with evaluating agentic or LLM-based systems (e.g., decision-quality measurement, human-in-the-loop calibration) is a plus.

Skills

Required

• Causal inference
• Experimentation
• Applied statistical modeling
• End-to-end ML development
• Statistical programming (Python or R)
• Database usage (SQL)
• Independent work and roadmap setting
• Cross-functional alignment

Preferred

• Payments Fraud/Risk Domain expertise

Benefits

• Our job titles may span more than one career level. The actual base pay is dependent upon many factors, such as: training, transferable skills, work experience, business needs and market demands. The base pay range is subject to change and may be modified in the future. This role may also be eligible for bonus, equity, benefits, and Employee Travel Credits.
• $179,000—$210,000 USD