Description

You will own the technical strategy and architectural direction of Airbnb's authorization platform, evolving it to support AI-era patterns. You'll lead design and development, partner with cross-functional teams, and set engineering standards to make authorization reliable, secure, and correct by default.

Requirements

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, with significant time designing and operating large-scale, high-reliability distributed systems.
• Deep expertise in authorization, access control, or identity systems, including policy models, permission frameworks, or trust infrastructure at production scale.
• Demonstrated track record of owning complex, cross-organizational technical strategy: authoring foundational RFCs, building alignment across teams with competing priorities, and making high-stakes architectural commitments.
• Experience influencing engineering standards beyond your immediate team, at the engineering council, org-wide, or across platform and product organizations.
• Strong communication and technical leadership skills, with the ability to engage effectively across engineering, security, product leadership, and external partners.
• Familiarity with AI agent architectures and the security and authorization challenges they introduce is a strong plus.

Responsibilities

• Lead the design, development, and evolution of Airbnb’s authorization platform, shaping roadmap, architecture, and delivery while ensuring high reliability, performance, and operational excellence at scale.
• Help drive the next generation of authorization for AI and agentic workflows, defining clear access models for agents and building systems that enforce correctness, least-privilege access, and end-to-end auditability.
• Partner with InfoSec, AI/ML Infra, Product, Privacy, and Data teams to align on authorization standards and drive adoption across the platform.
• Lead design and execution of high-impact, high-risk authorization initiatives across multiple teams and systems.
• Set and uphold engineering standards through design reviews, technical leadership, and mentorship of senior engineers.