Policy Manager, Consults and Escalations

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 The Community and Product Policy team creates and evolves principled policies that establish the rules of the road for guests and hosts across Airbnb. We solve complex marketplace and Trust & Safety challenges using data, stakeholder collaboration, and excellent judgement to support our community at scale. We team up with our cross-functional partners to create clear and accessible policy enforcement guides and to continuously measure, maintain, and improve our policies. We handle policy escalations and consults from across the business to ensure tough calls are resolved in accordance with our principles. The Difference You Will Make • You are a seasoned policy expert, with experience handling complex escalations • You love solving problems and have a track record of strong cross-functional collaboration • You’re an experienced communicator, with exceptional writing skills and presentation skills, including to senior executive audiences • You are principled and rigorous — you incorporate diverse perspectives in pursuit of the best decisions and outcomes possible • You are fluent with AI tools for gaining operational efficiency, but you exercise excellent judgement and know human expertise and supervision is paramount • You can build and interrogate prompting, automated workflows, data queries, and stress-test model output before it reaches a decision-maker — you know when a number is not trustworthy and how to course correct • You are a team player who thrives in a fast-moving environment and brings a strategic mindset to your work As a Consults and Escalations Manager in Community Policy, you will work across the business to understand every aspect of a case. You’ll provide timely policy analysis and corresponding enforcement recommendations, and continuously evaluate and improve our policies to handle new issues as they arise. You will resolve individual user matters and translate what you learn into policy insights and recommended changes — using your case handling expertise alongside AI and data tooling you will detect patterns across escalation volume. You'll automate things like detection and reporting, but you'll make the judgment call, document the reasoning, and own the outcome. You will help our leaders understand recurring issues and how we can fix them in the future. This role will serve as an important player in developing our global policy improvements and will have a direct impact on the peace of mind of millions of Airbnb community members around the world. A Typical Day • Drive complicated escalations and issues towards a solution • Advise our operations teams on cases where there are policy gaps to arrive at a solution that is guided by Airbnb’s principles and values • Collaborate with cross-functional stakeholders across the business including but not limited to the Global Operations, Supply, Public Policy, Legal, Product, Trust and Safety, Communications and Partnerships • Build AI-assisted detection of repeat policy questions and gray areas, turning consult volume into a standing signal to help drive trainings and policy clarifications • Query, join, and visualize operational data to evaluate policy performance and pressure-test policy improvement recommendations before they reach leadership • Design and ship workflows that reduce avoidable consults, cut handling time on the rest, and measure the gain • Exercise final judgment on ambiguous, high-exposure escalations, and make the reasoning exceptionally clear to Legal, Ops, and executives Your Expertise • 6+ years experience in an Operations, Policy, Legal, or Trust and Safety role • A track record of strong leadership in handling issues and escalations • Demonstrated capacity for critical thinking, research, and analysis; strong attention to detail • Exceptional writing and presentation abilities to explain and simplify complex information to others • Thoughtful business judgment, strategic thinking, and ability to work well under pressure • Experience working in a matrix and driving solutions to complex problems through cross-functional collaboration • Fluency in data analysis and demonstrated use of AI tools to create operational leverage — with the discipline to validate any output and the judgment to know what should not be delegated to a model Preferred Experience • Experience working closely with operations teams, preferably in the Trust and Safety space • Experience building or piloting AI/LLM-assisted workflows in operations, policy, or compliance • Familiarity with quality measurement or QA frameworks for frontline teams Reasonable Accommodations: We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations throughout the recruitment process for applicants with disabilities. If you need assistance, or an accommodation, please let your recruiter know once you are contacted about a role. A Note on Recruiting Scams: Scammers sometimes pose as Airbnb recruiters to get money or personal information from candidates. A few things that will always be true for Airbnb’s hiring process: our open roles are posted on Airbnb’s Career’s Page at careers.airbnb.com, and our recruiters correspond only from @airbnb.com or @ext.airbnb.com email addresses. Our recruiters will never ask for your Social Security number, bank account details, passport, or payment app information while you are interviewing. We’ll also never ask you to pay a fee, send money, deposit or cash a check, or purchase work-related equipment (such as a company laptop) during the interview process. We encourage candidates to remain vigilant of these