Staff Software Engineer, Security

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.

The Community You Will Join:

Airbnb is built on trust. The data security team’s mission is to keep the data of millions of users secured and protected in our platform while they explore the world.

The Difference You Will Make:

We are seeking a talented and experienced Staff Software Engineer to lead our efforts in identifying, securing, and preventing the leakage of data. This role will involve designing and implementing robust controls to safeguard our data infrastructure while collaborating with cross-functional teams to ensure security best practices and privacy compliance. We’d love to talk to you if you’re a talented individual who is passionate about finding security weaknesses and crafting highly scalable solutions. We are enablers who make it easier for engineers to create secure features, not blockers. 

A Typical Day: 

If the mission sounds exciting to you, we have a few different flavors of projects/skill sets that we are looking for in Data Security Team:

Key Responsibilities:

• Develop and implement systems to identify and protect sensitive and personal data.
• Data Protection Platform (DPP): Build the end to end platform to automatically classify the Airbnb data and protect the data based on the classifications with various strategies such as uplevel and scale services for automatic detection for data classification. 
• Contribute to the auto detection of the secret and critical data using advanced machine learning models and Regex patterns for all types of data storages such as Relational and Non-relational databases, Cloud Storage,  Code.
• Design and enforce controls to prevent data leakage across various platforms. Automate security enforcement at scale, collaborate with data platform teams and product teams for data governance best practice, such as Notifications, Call to action, or Access Revocation. 
• Implement Robust access controls, encryption and data masking to protect sensitive data and enable responsible AI/ML. 
• Collaborate with Data Infrastructure to design and build complex back end architecture that are both performative and scalable to provide a deep understanding of the risk of all Airbnb data, such as data ownership, data access, and data lineage etc
• Build the platform to manage all the 3rd-party vendors integrated with the Airbnb platform and protect the Airbnb user data shared with vendors
• Build and maintain scalable data infrastructure, leveraging AWS cloud technologies. Find opportunities to expand DLP coverage on AWS-Corp, Azure, GCP and OCI. 
• Collaborate with security teams to ensure compliance with data protection regulations.
• Integrate AI/ML into security practices to bring greater contextual awareness and wherever possible. E.g. Leverage LLMs for advanced data discovery and classification, data security incident response etc.
• Troubleshoot and resolve issues related to data security and infrastructure.

Check out project examples in technical blogs:

• Personal Data Classification
• Automating Data Protection at Scale, Part 1
• Automating Data Protection at Scale, Part 2
• Automating Data Protection at Scale, Part 3
• Where S Waldo S W 2-  Building Data Discovery And Classification At Scale

Your Expertise:

The following are some examples of profiles that are relevant to us. If a subset of these things apply to you, please consider applying. We are looking to build a team of both specialists in security and generalists in software engineering.

• 9+ years of software development or job related work experience.
• Prior experience in data loss prevention or related security fields.
• Knowledge of data classification, encryption, and compliance frameworks.
• Working knowledge of cloud computing (AWS), GCP, or Azure is a plus. 
• Prior