Staff Software Engineer, Passport & Commerce Platform

airbnb, Inc.; Northern (KY); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Airbnb is seeking a Staff Software Engineer on the Passport team to architect the next generation of the account platform, influencing how millions of guests and hosts experience Airbnb.

You will set technical direction for account state, eligibility, and entitlements, ensuring scalable, reliable delivery across surfaces while collaborating with Payments, Privacy, and product partners to stand up new offerings.

Qualifications

• 9+ years of experience designing and scaling complex, distributed backend systems.
• Track record as a technical leader who has set architecture direction for a team or domain.
• Deep expertise in distributed systems fundamentals, including data consistency, caching, service decomposition, and API design at scale.
• Experience building or operating systems involving financial transactions, entitlements, or other stateful account data is strongly preferred.
• Experience mentoring senior engineers and influencing technical decisions across multiple teams.
• Comfort operating with ambiguity on a newly formed team, including helping define team scope, roadmap, and technical foundations.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, with experience driving alignment across engineering, product, and design partners.

Responsibilities

• Design and evolve the core services and data models that track account state, eligibility, and entitlements across millions of accounts
• Partner with product and design to translate new product concepts into scalable, extensible technical designs
• Collaborate with Payments and Wallet engineering to ensure credits, discounts, and host-funded programs settle correctly end-to-end
• Set technical direction and lead design reviews across a growing team, mentoring engineers and raising the bar on system design
• Drive cross-team architecture decisions with Identity & Privacy and Profile & Community teams to keep account state consistent with Airbnb's broader Passport model
• Identify and resolve reliability, scalability, and data-integrity risks before they affect guests or hosts

Skills

Distributed systems

Technical leadership

Architecture direction

Mentoring engineers

Communication

Ambiguity handling

Job description

Airbnb is seeking a Staff Software Engineer on the Passport team to architect the next generation of the account platform, influencing how millions of guests and hosts experience Airbnb.

You will set technical direction for account state, eligibility, and entitlements, ensuring scalable, reliable delivery across surfaces while collaborating with Payments, Privacy, and product partners to stand up new offerings.