Senior Software Engineer, App Foundation (Backend)

Airbnb is a global company that connects hosts and guests through unique stays and experiences. They are seeking a Senior Software Engineer for their App Foundation team to build high-quality backend capabilities, improve app performance, and influence architectural standards across their backend ecosystem.

Responsibilities:

• Explore, shape, and develop new product experiences alongside cross-functional partners (design and product); from ideation to implementation at scale
• Build efficient and reusable backend capabilities, with high quality, while making sure to maintain performance and scalable systems
• Lead initiatives that measurably improve Guest and Host experience by improving app responsiveness, scale efficiently and reliability across key backend paths that impact millions
• Drive a performance roadmap: identifying bottlenecks, prioritizing work by impact, and delivering improvements across services, data access patterns, and infrastructure
• Raise the bar on performance engineering by building tooling, benchmarks, and guardrails that prevent regressions and make performance a first-class part of how teams ship
• Influence architecture and standards across Airbnb’s backend ecosystem, making systems more observable, more efficient, and easier to evolve
• Work collaboratively in cross-functional teams with design, product and data science partners, to define and ship impactful features
• Propose architectural patterns of a high-scale applications, such as well-designed APIs, data pipelines and efficient algorithms
• Writing unit and integration tests, reviewing other’s code
• Review service-level performance metrics and triage anomalies or regressions
• Profile and debug performance issues across service boundaries and implement fixes (e.g., query optimization, caching strategies, concurrency improvements, payload reduction)
• Partner with engineers across teams to improve critical request flows - aligning on SLOs, rollout plans, and measurement strategies
• Participate in code reviews and architecture discussions with a performance lens, helping teams ship changes safely and efficiently
• Document learnings and create playbooks so performance improvements scale beyond a single service or team

Requirements:

• 5+ years of software development experience
• Strong expertise in one or more back-end server languages (Java/Kotlin/C++/etc.)
• Experience in building and scaling high-quality and high-traffic products (or systems) in a distributed manner
• Deep backend expertise, including proficiency with databases, cloud technologies, and asynchronous messaging systems
• End-to-end ownership mentality that transcends team boundaries
• Passion for building strong collaborative relationships with other engineering & product partners
• Want to tackle projects with large open-ended scope and drive significant business impact
• Able to self-serve on data analysis and make data driven decisions
• Rigorous attention to detail and the ability to tackle ambiguous problems
• Embrace the ever changing culture, prioritize breadth over then in-depth but can still go in-depth when needed