Staff Software Engineer, Tech Foundations

Airbnb, Inc.; United States; Remote; USD 212,000 - 265,000; Full time

Job summary

Airbnb, Inc. is seeking a Staff Software Engineer for the Observability team to shape the platform that ingests, processes, and queries telemetry data at scale.

You will lead design and delivery of distributed systems, mentor engineers, and influence decisions on cost, reliability, and developer productivity. You will apply deep expertise in metrics, logs, and traces, with strong Go or Java/Kotlin coding skills and experience in Kubernetes and AWS.

Qualifications

• 9+ years of experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems.
• Led the technical direction of a system or multi-team project end to end.
• Deep telemetry domain experience: metrics, logs, or tracing at scale.
• Strong coding skills in Go or Java/Kotlin and comfortable with unfamiliar codebases.
• Cloud-native infrastructure experience: Kubernetes and AWS.

Responsibilities

• Lead design and delivery of distributed systems handling tens of millions of events per second.
• Write well-tested, readable code and contribute to open-source projects.
• Align roadmaps across Observability and partner infrastructure and product teams.
• Explain tradeoffs and ROI to engineering leadership in terms of reliability and cost.

Skills

Go

Java/Kotlin

Kubernetes

AWS

OpenTelemetry

Distributed systems

Tools

Prometheus

Grafana Mimir

VictoriaMetrics

OpenSearch

Jaeger

Kafka

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 Community You Will Join:

Airbnb's mission is to create a world where people can Belong Anywhere. Our community of guests and hosts rely on Airbnb around the clock to facilitate millions of stays and experiences per day.

The Observability team builds the platform Airbnb engineers use to understand how their systems behave in production. We collect, process, store, and query metrics, logs, events, and traces from both backend services and client apps. Our metrics platform alone ingests tens of millions of samples per second across more than a billion active time series. AI agents are now consumers of this data alongside engineers: they query telemetry to write and validate code and to help debug production issues. We continue to invest in reliable and efficient real time system for both AI and human access.

The Difference You Will Make:

As a Staff engineer, you will set the technical direction for a major area of the Observability platform and lead it from design through production. Problems in front of us include:

• Scaling the metrics pipeline (OpenTelemetry, vmagent, Grafana Mimir) while controlling cost through aggregation, sampling, and blocking unused metrics.
• Replacing legacy log aggregation with an OpenTelemetry-based pipeline, and evolving log and trace storage on OpenSearch.
• Building a fast, reliable query layer for both engineers and AI agents, with rate limiting, access control, isolation, and caching so agent traffic does not slow down incident response.
• Giving teams self-service visibility and control over their telemetry cost: unit cost per team and service, and controls for granularity, sampling, and retention.
• Improving time to detect with anomaly detection and automated correlation across signals.

A Typical Day:

• Lead the design and delivery of distributed systems that handle tens of millions of events per second, from prototype to production operation.
• Write well-crafted, well-tested, readable, maintainable code, and contribute back to the open-source projects we run on.
• Align roadmaps across Observability and partner infrastructure and product teams, and drive build, buy, and open-source decisions.
• Explain tradeoffs and return on investment to engineering leadership in terms of reliability, cost, and developer productivity.
• Mentor engineers on the team and raise the bar on design reviews, operational readiness, and on-call.
• Help Airbnb engineers instrument their services and self-serve when debugging production issues.

Your Expertise:

• 9+ years of industry experience, with a track record of building and operating large-scale distributed systems in production.
• Led the technical direction of a system or multi-team project end to end: wrote the design, aligned stakeholders, delivered it, and operated it.
• Deep experience in at least one telemetry domain at scale: metrics (Prometheus, Grafana Mimir, VictoriaMetrics), logs (OpenSearch, Kafka), or distributed tracing (OpenTelemetry, Jaeger, ClickHouse).
• Strong coding skills in Go or Java/Kotlin, and comfortable working in unfamiliar codebases, including upstream open source.
• Experience with cloud-native infrastructure: Kubernetes, AWS, and service mesh (Istio, Envoy).
• Clear written and verbal communication, including design docs and tradeoff analysis for engineering leadership.

Nice to Have:

• Contributions to OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana Mimir, VictoriaMetrics, OpenSearch, Jaeger, or similar projects.
• Experience with time series storage internals, high-cardinality data, or query performance.
• Anomaly detection, automated correlation, or SLO-based alerting.
• Telemetry cost attribution or cost optimization at scale.
• Building APIs or tools for AI agents that consume operational data, such as MCP servers.
• Columnar analytics stores such as ClickHouse.

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

$212,000 — $265,000 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.