Senior Backend Engineer - Distributed Systems (Remote)

Airbnb; United States; Remote; USD 196,000 - 227,000; Full time

Job summary

Airbnb is seeking a Senior Software Engineer for the Users Foundation team to design and build distributed systems at scale, ensuring correctness and reliability. The role centers on owning production services end-to-end and influencing foundational systems across the platform.

You will work with engineering teams to ship changes safely to shared infrastructure, mentor engineers, and drive operational excellence in a high-traffic environment.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience, with experience owning production services end-to-end.
• Strong fundamentals in distributed systems, including messaging/eventing, data consistency, and service reliability patterns.
• Experience building and operating high-traffic backend services.
• Track record of leading ambiguous, multi-month projects from problem definition through delivery.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, especially for technical design and cross-team coordination.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate backend services and APIs that are core dependencies across the company's platform.
• Lead multi-engineer projects end-to-end, from problem definition through rollout and operations.
• Improve the reliability and scalability of systems that handle account data and events at high volume.
• Partner with engineering teams across the company to plan and safely execute changes to shared infrastructure.
• Mentor other engineers and help raise the bar on code quality, testing, and operational excellence.

Job description

Airbnb is seeking a Senior Software Engineer for the Users Foundation team to design and build distributed systems at scale, ensuring correctness and reliability. The role centers on owning production services end-to-end and influencing foundational systems across the platform.

You will work with engineering teams to ship changes safely to shared infrastructure, mentor engineers, and drive operational excellence in a high-traffic environment.