Senior Software Engineer, Knowledge Graph

Airbnb, founded in 2007, connects guests with hosts through unique stays and experiences. The Senior Software Engineer will design and scale the data platform behind Airbnb’s graph system, focusing on scalable data ingestion and system performance in production environments.

Responsibilities:

• Partner with infra and product teams to deeply understand use case requirements and define the technical vision for the Knowledge Graph
• Design, build, and scale the end-to-end (E2E) Travel Graph infrastructure, prioritizing a robust and easy-to-use platform for all consumers and producers of graph data
• Lead the large-scale data onboarding strategy, focusing on a user-friendly experience for ingesting diverse data sources (1st and 3rd party data, derived signals) via both batch and Near Real-Time (NRT) pipelines
• Ensure seamless, high-performance integration of the Knowledge Graph with a variety of downstream systems, including Search, Machine Learning, and Analytics
• Debug complex production issues and continuously improve system reliability, observability, and performance

Requirements:

• BS/MS/PhD in Computer Science, a related field, or equivalent work experience
• 5+ years of industry experience with a BS/Masters, and 3+ years with a PhD
• Proven success in building and maintaining high-scale distributed systems, particularly in data infrastructure, databases, or streaming platforms
• Hands-on experience with technologies like Kafka, Flink, Spark, or similar for data ingestion and processing
• Hands-on experience applying AI/ML techniques to data infrastructure problems
• Strong system design and debugging skills, with a focus on real-world reliability and scalability
• Experience with large language models (e.g., Claude, LLMs) for productivity is a plus