About this 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:
Payments and Central Strategic Finance & Analytics (SFA) owns the forecasting, reporting, and analysis behind the economics of Airbnb's global payments platform. The team is responsible for planning and reporting payment processing costs and payments-driven financial results to key internal and external stakeholders, and partners with senior leaders across Payments, Product, and Finance to provide analytical support for critical business decisions. The team also owns company-wide OKR performance management, running the monthly Strategy Performance Forum that gives leadership a single view of how Airbnb's strategy is tracking against its goals.
The Difference You Will Make:
Airbnb moves tens of billions of dollars in guest and host payments every year, and the cost of processing those payments is one of the largest drivers of our cost of revenue — so how well we forecast, explain, and optimize it flows straight into the P&L and into what we report to investors each quarter. We're looking for an Associate Principal to own that work: leading Payments and Central SFA through annual planning, quarterly earnings, and monthly forecasting, and turning ambiguous, high-stakes questions into clear frameworks and recommendations that senior leaders act on. You'll operate with a high degree of autonomy and own problems end to end.
A Typical Day:
• Help lead Company-wide OKR Performance Management through the monthly Strategy Performance Forum. Own the end-to-end cadence of collecting updates from focus-area leads, consolidating them into a single company view, and producing the executive deck leadership uses to monitor strategy execution.
• Lead forecasting, planning, and variance analysis for Airbnb's payment processing costs (processor, network, and interchange fees) across annual planning, quarterly guidance, and monthly close.
• Partner with Payments product and business leaders to build the financial cases for new initiatives — alternative payment methods, processor routing and cost optimization, pricing, and chargeback/risk strategy.
• Own the financial modeling of payment volume and payment-method mix, translating those movements into their impact on the company P&L.
• Build and improve the analytical frameworks and reporting that connect payments KPIs — acceptance, cost per transaction, GBV and payment flows — to financial outcomes.
• Compile CFO- and executive-level reporting on payments performance, including monthly financial performance reviews and dashboard updates.
Your Expertise:
• 7+ years of relevant experience in F