Jobs / United States / Airbnb
Senior Software Engineer, Payments Transaction Risk
Airbnb · 🇺🇸 San Francisco, CA
Sponsorship verdict
Sponsorship possible
One solid signal, not two — worth applying, and worth asking about sponsorship early.
- Employer is on a government sponsor recordThe US Department of Labor certified 167 H-1B/E-3 labor condition applications for this employer between Oct 2025 and Jun 2026 (latest Jun 2026) — the step every H-1B hire needs first. USCIS also records 71 H-1B approvals in FY2023. Source: LCA disclosure data (US Department of Labor (OFLC)).
- The posting doesn’t mention sponsorshipSilence isn’t a refusal — ask the recruiter before investing much time.
- No salary bar for this routeH-1B has no fixed salary bar: the employer must pay at least the prevailing wage for the role and area. Cap-subject employers enter a lottery weighted by wage level. Source: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/12/29/2025-23853/weighted-selection-process-for-registrants-and-petitioners-seeking-to-file-cap-subject-h-1b, rules effective 2026-02-27.
- What Airbnb paid sponsored hires in similar roles82 certified filings for “Software Engineer” (Software Developers) in CA: $191k–$204k, median $196k. Most were filed at wage level III (45%) — 3 lottery entries, ≈46% projected selection odds for cap-subject employers. Source: US Department of Labor LCA disclosure data (Oct 2025 – Jun 2026).
- Confirmed live todayWhen a source last listed this job as open.
US H-1B: cap-subject employers enter a lottery weighted by wage level — Level I gets 1 entry, Level IV gets 4 (DHS projected selection odds ≈15% at Level I to ≈61% at Level IV). Universities and non-profit research employers are cap-exempt. The $100,000 fee for new petitions from abroad is currently blocked by a court order (appeal pending).
A verdict summarises public evidence; it is not legal advice and never a guarantee — the employer and the immigration authority decide. Sign in to factor in where you can already work.
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Sponsor Radar — Airbnb
The US Department of Labor certified 167 H-1B/E-3 labor condition applications for this employer between Oct 2025 and Jun 2026 (latest Jun 2026) — the step every H-1B hire needs first. USCIS also records 71 H-1B approvals in FY2023. Source: LCA disclosure data (US Department of Labor (OFLC)).
Past sponsorship or register membership never guarantees sponsorship for this vacancy or for you. Full Sponsor Radar for Airbnb →
About the role
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 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. The Difference You Will Make: We are looking for talented and self-motivated Senior Software Engineers who are passionate about working in this highly dynamic domain and collaborating with world-class XFN teams to advance our mission. As part of the Payments Risk Engineering team, you will be in charge of designing and building a wide range of scalable systems and robust infrastructure to detect, mitigate and resolve risk issues across our entire payments platform, and to protect our communities and businesses from all malicious activities and fraudulent actors. You will be deeply involved in the technical details of building highly available and real-time risk services in close collaboration with product, data science and operations teams to understand and react to the ever evolving risk scenarios and to make Airbnb the world’s safest while easiest to use payments platform. A Typical Day: • Building and maintaining a long-term technology stack with well defined APIs that is service-oriented, modular, granular, observable, and efficient. • Working closely with data scientists, product managers and other XFN partners to build business insights, develop product features and respond to fraud attacks and risk issues across the platform. • Building and maintaining integrations with third party vendors / payments networks & processors to empower our in house risk systems. • Developing and iterating on our risk detection, mitigation and resolution strategies as risk scenarios/business requirements evolve. • Focusing on continuous monitoring and alerting to uplevel the quality and observability of our risk systems. • Collaborating with other engineering teams across Airbnb to advance our engineering process and technical foundation. Your Expertise: • 5+ years of relevant industry experience (Payments/Fintech) as a backend software engineer. • Proficient in at least one major programming language (preferably Java/Kotlin/Python). Experience in React (or any equivalent JS library) would be nice to have. • Exposure to architectural patterns of large, high-scale web applications, such as well-designed APIs, high volume data pipelines, and efficient algorithms. • Passion for delivering products end-to-end, from ideation through planning and scoping to implementation and experimental A/B testing. • Rigor in high code quality, automated testing, and other engineering best practices. • Experience or desire to work collaboratively in cross-functional teams with product, data scientists, design and operations. • Familiarity with experimentation and machine learning techniques • Outstanding communication and interpersonal skills and detail oriented. • Capable of making data driven decisions and articul