Lead, Advanced Analytics, Fraud and Safety Operations

About the role

In this role, you will lead efforts to develop data-driven strategies aimed at mitigating fraud and safety risks on the Airbnb platform. You will collaborate with various teams to create self-service data tools, enabling non-technical staff to derive actionable insights from complex data.

Success in this position involves crafting clear narratives and dashboards that communicate findings to executives and ensuring that fraud and safety metrics are robust and scalable. You will also play a key role in supporting audits and reporting by providing well-governed data and analytical insights.

The pay range for this role is $164,000 to $191,000 USD, depending on various factors.

Skills that matter here

• data analytics: This role requires extensive experience in data analytics to inform decision-making and enhance safety measures.
• SQL: Strong SQL skills are essential for managing and modeling large datasets effectively.
• Python: Familiarity with Python is needed to develop analytical models and tools.
• R: Knowledge of R will support advanced statistical analysis and data visualization.
• ML pipelines: Understanding of ML pipelines is important for implementing machine learning solutions for fraud detection.

Who this role suits

• A candidate with a strong analytical background and experience in fraud or safety analytics.
• Someone who enjoys storytelling through data and can communicate complex insights clearly.
• An individual who thrives in a collaborative environment and can empower teams with data tools.
• A detail-oriented professional who is skilled in statistical analysis and experimental design.

From the employer

A Typical Day:

• Build self-service data tools that empower non-technical teams to ask deep questions, run “what if” analyses, and generate actionable, data-backed outcomes without gatekeeping.
• Craft compelling narratives and dashboards that surface insights to executives and cross-functional teams.
• Ensure fraud and safety metrics are future-proof, scalable and supported by clear governance, ownership and automated monitoring.
• Own launch and decision criteria for fraud and safety experiments by defining launch thresholds, gating metric releases on decision quality, and helping leadership make data-driven decisions.
• Support external audits, law-enforcement requests, and board-level reporting with rigorous, well-governed data and clear analytical narratives.
• Operationalize frameworks that instantly assess and size the platform, reputational and regulatory impact of fraud incidents, enabling rapid escalation, crystal-clear retrospectives and systematic learning.

Your Expertise:

• 5+ years of experience in data analytics, fraud, safety, or a related quantitative domain, with deep individual-contributor expertise, or 2+ years of industry experience with a PhD.
• Proven ownership of large-scale data products or taxonomies.
• Strong SQL and data-modeling expertise; familiarity with Python/R; working knowledge of ML pipelines.
• Strong experience designing experiments and applying causal inference methods, ideally in a multi-sided platform setting.
• Deep understanding of how to measure rare events with statistical rigor, including prevalence estimation, sampling strategy, and statistical power.
• Familiarity with account integrity, user authentication and connected-account vectors, such as social logins, device fingerprinting and related identity signals.
• Skilled in incident impact scoping, post-incident analytics, scenario planning or tabletop exercises, and translating insights into systematic improvements.
• Track record of enabling legal, policy, ops, product, and engineering teams to make independent, forward-facing, data-driven decisions via self-service tools.
• Exceptional storyteller with the ability to make complex analytics actionable for every audience.

How We'll Take Care of You:

• Our job titles may span more than one career level. The actual base pay is dependent upon many factors, such as: training, transferable skills, work experience, business needs and market demands.
• The base pay range is subject to change and may be modified in the future.
• This role may also be eligible for bonus, equity, benefits, and Employee Travel Credits.
• Pay Range $164,000 — $191,000 USD.