Senior Data Scientist - Payments (Inference)

About this role

<div class="content-intro"><p><span style="font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Airbnb was born in 2007 when two hosts welcomed three guests to their San Francisco home, and has since grown to over 5 million hosts who have welcomed over 2 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.</span></p></div><p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; color: #000000;"><strong>The Community You Will Join: </strong></span></p> <p>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.</p> <p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; color: #000000;"><strong>The Difference You Will Make:</strong></span></p> <p>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.<br><br>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 &amp; product roadmaps. They are not only the trusted data expert on their team, but also a storyteller.</p> <p>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.</p> <p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; color: #000000;"><strong>A Typical Day:&nbsp;</strong></span></p> <ul> <li><strong>Inference: </strong>Develop and apply causal inference methods, including experimental, econometric regressions, and quasi-experimental methods to measure a wide-range of platform/product impacts.</li> <li><strong style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">AI/ML: </strong><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">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.</span></li> <li><strong>Optimization:&nbsp;</strong>Develop methodologies to explore/simulate the impact of new interventions and develop data products to optimize product/operational strategies.</li> <li><strong>Communication:&nbsp;</strong>Deliver robust research reports and effective data visualizations. Collaborate with and present to stakeholders to identify opportunities and communicate findings, and drive impact.</li> <li><strong>Empowerment:&nbsp;</strong>Think strategically about opportunities to improve and scale our brand measurement and customer insights.</li> </ul> <p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; color: #000000;"><strong>Your Expertise:</strong></span></p> <ul> <li>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.</li> <li>Strong knowledge of causal inference, experimentation, applied statistical modeling, and end-to-end ML development.</li> <li>Skilled in statistical programming (Python or R) and database usage (SQL)</li> <li>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.</li> <li>Proven ability to communicate clearly and effectively to audiences of varying technical levels</li> <li>Ability to work independently, set your own roadmap, and drive cross-functional alignment</li> <li>Payments Fraud/Risk Domain expertise is a strong plus.</li> <li>Familiarity with evaluating agentic or LLM-based systems (e.g., decision-quality measurement, human-in-the-loop calibration) is a plus.</li> </ul> <p><span style="color: #000000; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;"><strong>Your Location:</strong></span></p> <p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; color: #000000;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">This position is US - Remote Eligible. The role may include occasional work at an Airbnb offic