Staff Software Engineer (Technical Lead), Storage

Airbnb is a global platform that connects hosts and guests, and they are seeking a Staff Software Engineer (Technical Lead) for their Online Data organization. In this role, you will drive the technical vision and execution for KV stores and caching infrastructure, mentor engineers, and shape architectural decisions to deliver high-impact solutions.

Responsibilities:

• Drive the technical vision and execution for our KV stores and caching infrastructure
• Mentor engineers and shape architectural decisions
• Define the multi-year technical roadmap for caching and KV infrastructure at Airbnb
• Evolve our KV store from derived-data workloads to support system-of-record use cases, expanding the platform's capabilities and customer base
• Build a multi-tenant caching solution for Airbnb
• Guide the rearchitecture of our KV write path to remove infrastructure complexity while improving replication lag
• Oversee frameworks for high-traffic, zero-downtime migrations between critical data platforms

Requirements:

• 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