Process Risk and Compliance Operations Manager

The Community You Will Join

• Handles tens of millions of interactions yearly, engaging with Airbnb customers by phone, messaging, chat, or social media channels.
• Engages with issues across categories including Cancellations, Account Issues, Refunds, Payments, Reservations, Extenuating Circumstances, Booking & Listing issues, Safety & Claims.
• Globally distributed with offices in San Francisco, Dublin, Montreal, Seattle, Singapore, Manila, Gurgaon and an extensive partner network serving all regions.

The Difference You Will Make

• Owns the strategic design and continuous evolution of risk frameworks, the risk registry, and executive risk narratives for Community Support.
• Ensures that investigative outcomes are contextualized within the broader risk ecosystem, informing risk appetite decisions, shaping detection strategy, and driving remediation accountability.
• Serves as the program manager for systemic root cause resolution, ensuring that structural vulnerabilities are tracked, assigned, resourced, and driven to completion.
• Led governance and discussions of the implications of deploying AI in high-stakes decision-making environments, ensuring that AI-driven processes are governed with the same rigor as human-driven ones.

A Typical Day

• Designs and owns the CS Risk Appetite Framework, defining guardrails, escalation triggers, and pre-approved response actions.
• Owns and evolves the CS Risk Registry as a living strategic instrument, challenging what gets prioritized, determining risk scores, identifying missed risks, and ensuring accountability for remediation.
• Develops and stresses-test risk assessment standards, including KRIs, risk typologies, and emerging threat hypotheses.
• Supports the evolution of models and processes used in detection triage and investigation, interrogating model assumptions and sources of risk.
• Establishes ongoing governance cadences, such as risk review boards, quarterly risk assessments, and challenge sessions.
• Collaborates with the Insider Threat Investigations to ensure investigative outcomes are systematically captured, contextualized, and integrated into risk governance.
• Co-designs escalation and review protocols for high-severity investigation findings and risk non-compliant transactions, ensuring that escalation criteria evolve as threat actors adapt.
• Participates in joint case reviews, postmortems, and incident debriefs to extract systemic insights and drive deeper investigations.
• Provides strategic risk context to the Investigations team, helping prioritize investigative focus areas based on risk registry intelligence, KRI trends, and organizational risk appetite.
• Coordinates the feedback loop between investigations and AI-driven detection systems, ensuring that investigative findings inform detection improvements and that detection model performance is tracked and reported.
• Owns the end-to-end lifecycle of root cause resolution, from identification through verified remediation and closure.
• Maintains and governs a centralized root cause and remediation tracker, reviewing it at regular governance cadences and escalating when timelines slip.
• Distinguishes between symptomatic fixes and true root cause resolution, advocating for structural solutions and holding workstream owners accountable.
• Drives cross-functional remediation workstreams, coordinating across relevant partner teams to ensure that root cause resolution plans are resourced, sequenced, and executed.
• Tracks resolution effectiveness over time, monitoring whether implemented fixes reduce recurrence of the underlying risk and advocating for deeper investigations if necessary.
• Integrates root cause intelligence into the risk registry and risk appetite framework, ensuring that patterns of recurring root causes inform risk scoring, KRI design, and strategic risk priorities.
• Reports on root cause resolution health to senior leadership, including metrics on open vs. closed root causes, average time to resolution, aging items, recurrence rates, and cross-functional accountability.
• Crafts and delivers executive-level risk narratives, providing the interpretive layer that tells leadership what the data means, what decisions are required, and what trade-offs are at stake.
• Owns the reporting architecture, determining what should be measured, how it should be presented, and to whom, and challenges vanity metrics.
• Defines and maintains monitoring thresholds and escalation triggers in collaboration with the Investigations Manager, ensuring these thresholds are calibrated to real-world conditions.
• Translates investigative findings, root cause resolution status, and AI model performance data into actionable risk mitigation recommendations, bridging the gap between technical teams and executive decision-makers.
• Drives cross-functional risk alignment, serving as the connective tissue that ensures risk is managed holistically rather than in silos.
• Leads systemic risk reviews, going beyond surface-level incident response to identify structural vulnerabilities, incentive misalignments, and process design flaws that create risk.
• Champions the integration of risk thinking into operational design, ensuring that new processes, tools, and AI deployments are evaluated through a risk lens before launch.
• Serves as a change agent for risk culture, moving the organization from reactive compliance toward proactive risk intelligence.
• Provides leadership and mentorship to more junior team members, developing their ability to think critically about risk, challenge data, and communicate effectively with senior stakeholders.
• Designs and delivers risk and compliance training that goes beyond checkbox compliance, building genuine risk literacy across CS teams, including an understanding of AI risks and limitations.
• Fosters a culture of constructive challenge, where team members are expected to question assumptions, flag concerns, and contribute to the continuous evolution of the risk program.