Senior Software Engineer Guest & Host

airbnb, Inc.; Northern (KY); Hybrid; USD 120,000 - 170,000; Full time

Job summary

Airbnb is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to help scale backend systems for user identity and privacy.

You will work on relationship-scoped access, data modeling, and service architecture critical to multiple product surfaces at Airbnb.

Qualifications

• 6+ years of backend software engineering experience with strong fundamentals in SOA, API design, and data modeling.
• Proficiency in Java and/or Kotlin within a microservices environment.
• Experience designing systems with correctness and authorization as first-class concerns.

Responsibilities

• Design and build backend services and APIs that enforce identity and privacy rules across product surfaces.
• Lead migrations and tooling to move away from legacy identity patterns with safe rollout.
• Define authorization logic for context-scoped data access and edge cases.
• Collaborate with teams across messaging, trips, and profile to ensure privacy primitives are usable.
• Participate in design and code reviews and drive thorough root-cause analysis of production issues.

Skills

Backend engineering

Service-oriented architecture

API design

Data modeling

Java / Kotlin

Microservices

Communication

Tools

RPC frameworks

Service IDLs

Dependency injection

Job description

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:

Guest & Host Technology builds the end-to-end experience that connects people around the world. Our team owns the identity and privacy layer beneath that experience: the systems that determine who can see what about whom, in what context, and why. That includes migrating how the rest of the company references users (moving from raw, global user identifiers to relationship-scoped identity), and building the privacy controls behind features like trip sharing and profile visibility. Get this layer wrong and it either breaks trust or breaks the product; our job is to make sure it does neither.

The Difference You Will Make:

We're looking for a Senior Software Engineer to help build and scale the backend systems behind user identity and privacy. You'll be reasoning about relationship-scoped access (who's allowed to see this, given the specific context they're asking from), and building systems that other teams across the company depend on to do the same correctly.

You’ll work across true backend fundamentals: service architecture, data modeling, authorization logic, and migration tooling that needs to run safely at Airbnb's scale without breaking the dozens of teams who consume these systems.

A Typical Day:

• Design and build backend services and APIs that enforce identity and privacy rules consistently across the company's product surfaces
• Contribute to large-scale migrations (e.g., moving service and client code off legacy identity patterns) — including the tooling that makes those migrations safe to run broadly, not just the one-off fixes
• Define and evolve authorization logic for context-scoped data access, and reason clearly about edge cases (e.g., who's allowed to see what, and why that answer differs by relationship or product surface)
• Partner with the teams building on top of your systems — messaging, trips, profile, and beyond — to make sure privacy primitives are usable and hard to misuse
• Participate in design and code reviews, and raise the bar for correctness on a part of the codebase where mistakes are costly
• Debug and resolve production issues with clear, structured root-cause analysis rather than surface-level fixes

Your Expertise:

• 6+ years of professional backend software engineering experience, with strong fundamentals in service-oriented architecture, API design, and data modeling
• Proficiency in Java and/or Kotlin, and comfort working within a microservices environment (RPC frameworks, service IDLs, dependency injection)
• Experience designing systems with correctness and authorization as first-class concerns, not an afterthought
• A track record of shipping migrations or infrastructure changes that other teams depend on, with attention to backward compatibility and rollout safety
• Strong written communication. You can clearly document a problem, its root cause, and trade-offs between solutions before escalating or proposing a fix
• Comfort with ambiguity: you can take a complex, evolving privacy or identity requirement and turn it into a concrete technical design without needing every detail spelled out

Our Commitment To Inclusion & Belonging:

Airbnb is committed to working with the broadest talent pool possible. We believe diverse ideas foster innovation and engagement, and allow us to attract creatively-led people, and to develop the best products, services and solutions. All qualified individuals are encouraged to apply.

We strive to also provide a disability inclusive application and interview process. If you are a candidate with a disability and require reasonable accommodation in order to submit an application, please contact us at: [e-mail] . Please include your full name, the role you’re applying for and the accommodation necessary to assist you with the recruiting process.

We ask that you only reach out to us if you are a candidate whose disability prevents you from being able to complete our online application.

Airbnb values diversity & belonging and is proud to be an Equal Employment Opportunity employer. All individuals seeking employment at Airbnb are considered without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, age, gender, sex, marital status, ancestry, physical or mental disability, veteran status, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, or any other legally protected characteristic.

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.