Senior Systems Engineer, Payments

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.

Senior Engineer, Payments Tech Operations

The Job

Airbnb Payments team allows any two people in the world to frictionlessly exchange money with easy to use payments services. It is a core strategy to fulfill Airbnb's belongs anywhere mission. We are building a world-class payments platform that moves billions of dollars, in 191 countries, with 75 currencies, through a complex ecosystem of payments partners. We build and maintain our own in-house global payments platform because no solution exists with the global reach needed. As the platform grows we'll be adding new payment partners, global licenses, compliance and regulation controls, and building new payment experiences for our guests and hosts.

Airbnb's business grows rapidly year over year, and so does Airbnb Payments' processing volume. Payments Availability, reliability & predictability is the key OKR for the Payments organization. As a Senior Engineer for Payments Tech Operations, this individual would be leading various operations and initiatives across Observability, Site Reliability and Automations/ Tooling. 

About Payments TechOps:

The Vision of Payments Techops is to empower Payments Engineering teams in delivering exceptional payment experiences to our Guests and Hosts through a foundation of Operational Excellence. TechOps shall achieve the same by 

• Driving the 'Customer Centric Payments Observability' through the Flow level monitoring
• Driving 'Customer Excellence' by managing all customer service escalations (incl. potential) for the Payments Engineering teams 
• Enhancing the 'Engineering Productivity' of the Payments Tech teams through proactive automations and tech-enabled processes

The role:

We are looking for a self-motivated engineer who can work in a highly dynamic environment by collaborating with cross-functional and cross-geographical teams. As a Senior Engineer, the person would be expected to bring in expertise driving technical initiatives, managing operational health of programs and bringing tools & automations to streamline processes. 

What you'll do:

• Drive the Flow level observability strategy including instrumentation & operations to enhance the detection & mitigation capabilities
• Drive initiatives independently to fix root-causes identified from the repeat issues observed across monitoring platforms - challenge the status quo and follow through to completion 
• Build proactive alerting and real-time monitoring tools to help identify issues early and in-collaboration with Product engineering teams, resolve the issues in a timely manner
• Develop observability standards/ framework for new product readiness to ensure service reliability in SOA and distributed systems
• Build Domain Expertise to achieve Scalability - by understanding the nuances of Payments  - across processing, compliance and infra
• Drive large scale migration and adoption projects on Observability & Reliability by cross-collaborating with various Payments teams 
• Collaborate with large set of stakeholders across engineering, infrastructure and operations teams to align and implement foundational & Operational programs 
• Automate our alerts configuration across various observability tools (eg. Watchpoint, Kibana, Datadog etc.) that work across signals - metrics, logs and traces
• Bring ideas to life (i.e. production) to help make the lives of engineers better
• Advocate and implement reliable design patterns (circuit breakers, graceful degradation, end-point monitoring etc.)
• Partner with the broader Airbnb organization to learn from incidents through a blameless post mortem process
• Automate as much as humanly possible and always configure as code

About You:

• 8+ years of technical experience, with 5+ years of relevant industry experience in a fast paced tech environment
• Experience in building and implementing Observability/ SRE along with expertise in building availability/Reliability tools in a similar environment
• Experience in driving E2E SRE initiatives (L2/L3) and improving observability & reliability, preferably in the payments space
• You have strong working knowledge across observability tools (eg. DataDog, Open Telemetry etc.) & SRE Practices
• Experience in Application and Tool development (Java, .Net, Python) in Microservices environments. Previous experience in AI/ML will be a plus. 
• Experience with initiatives across Auto scaling, Self-healing mechanism, Chaos Engineering, Performance optimization techniques will be a plus
• You have excellent communication skills and the ability to work well within a team and with teams across timezones
• You are a strong problem solver and have worked in a team that is on-call for production systems before
• Technical leadership: hands on experience leading project teams and setting technical direction and strategy
• You are passionate about efficiency, availability, technical quality and system quality