Staff Software Engineer, Infrastructure

airbnb, Inc.; Northern (KY); Hybrid; USD 204,000 - 255,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Employee Travel Credits

Bonus potential

Benefits

Job summary

Airbnb is seeking a Staff Software Engineer for Tech Foundations within the Online Data organization. You will help build and own high‑performing, multi‑tenant data services and ingestion platforms that power real-time experiences across Airbnb’s ecosystem.

You will mentor engineers, guide architectural choices, and drive long‑term technical strategy with cross‑team impact. This remote‑eligible role requires collaboration with product and platform teams and occasional office visits in the US.

Qualifications

• 9+ years of industry experience leading engineering teams.
• Deep expertise in distributed systems and scalable storage.
• Ability to influence across teams and drive technical strategy.

Responsibilities

• Lead a team of developers to deliver multi-quarter cross-functional projects.
• Mentor engineers and raise technical standards within the team.
• Stay up-to-date with data ingestion technologies and evaluate new approaches.
• Influence the team’s long-term roadmap and strategy for ingestion platforms.
• Mentor and coach team members to enhance skills and standards.
• Raise operational standards and participate in on-call rotations.

Skills

Distributed systems

Multi-tenant storage

Leadership & mentoring

Cross-team collaboration

Technical strategy

Onboarding to large codebases

Job description

Staff Software Engineer, Tech Foundations

United States

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 Online Data organization ensures Airbnb customers are delighted in experiences backed by real-time data. We empower Airbnb’s builders to create these experiences by offering intuitive data interfaces and tools without the need to be database experts.

The Difference You Will Make:

We’re hiring across multiple teams within our organization. Explore the section below to learn more about each team and the opportunities available.

The KV Stores & Caching team within Airbnb's Online Data org owns and operates critical pieces of Airbnb's online serving storage systems. Specifically, the team owns and is responsible for:

• A highly available, low-latency, distributed, multi-tenant KV store for Airbnb. This platform is used by user profiling, Search, ML, and pricing teams, supporting millions of read QPS and providing 99.9+% availability across thousands of customer tables.
• A set of control planes and clients that manage ElasticCache clusters for hundreds of Airbnb production clusters, at million+ IOPS and million+ indexing QPS.
• A scalable, reliable, performant distributed coordination service supporting many mission-critical systems (MySQL, Redis, Kafka, Flink, Druid, Zookeeper, etc).

The mission of the Ingestion team in the Online Database Infrastructure org is to provide a managed, reliable, performant and scalable platform for exporting data out of Airbnb’s online databases for asynchronous processing. The team currently builds and operates two managed solutions - one for near real time access to change logs (CDC) and another to provide periodic mutation and full table snapshots.

• As a member of this team you would be working with talented engineers on cutting edge technologies to help support Airbnb’s business. You will be the resident expert on the online data exports platform and guide and collaborate with our internal product teams to effectively use the platform.
• Lead a team of developers to deliver multi-quarter cross functional projects.
• Stay up‑to‑date with the latest developments in data ingestion systems and evaluate and incorporate new technologies and methodologies to improve the existing data ingestion architecture/solution.
• Influence the team’s and organization’s long‑term roadmap and strategy.
• Mentor and coach team members, providing guidance and support to enhance their skills and technical standards in the team.
• Raise operational standards by effectively and proactively identifying, debugging and fixing operational issues. Be part of the oncall rotation for the Ingestion team.

Your Expertise:

• 9+ years of relevant industry experience
• Proven track record of leading and mentoring engineering teams, setting technical direction, and growing engineers in their careers.
• Deep expertise in distributed systems, multi-tenant storage, and infrastructure. You've architected and scaled high‑performance, business‑critical systems.
• Demonstrated ability to collaborate and influence across teams and organizations, building alignment on technical strategy.
• Strong judgment on technical trade‑offs and ability to drive decisions that balance short‑term delivery with long‑term maintainability.
• Experience onboarding to and navigating a broad and complex codebase, and enabling others to do the same.

Your Location:

This position is US - Remote Eligible. The role may include occasional work at an Airbnb office or attendance at offsites, as agreed to with your manager. While the position is Remote Eligible, you must live in a state where Airbnb, Inc. has a registered entity. Click here for the up‑to‑date list of excluded states. This list is continuously evolving, so please check back with us if the state you live in is on the exclusion list. If your position is employed by another Airbnb entity, your recruiter will inform you what states you are eligible to work from.

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.

How We'll Take Care of You:

Our job titles may span more than one career level. The actual base pay is dependent upon many factors, such as: training, transferable skills, work experience, business needs and market demands. The base pay range is subject to change and may be modified in the future. This role may also be eligible for bonus, equity, benefits, and Employee Travel Credits.

Pay Range

$204,000 — $255,000 USD

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 recruiting scams and not share sensitive information if you do not believe an individual is actually affiliated with Airbnb.