Principal Software Engineer, Performance

Airbnb is a global company that connects hosts and guests through unique stays and experiences. They are seeking a Principal Software Engineer to lead the Performance team, focusing on defining long-term performance strategies and ensuring the efficiency of infrastructure while mentoring engineers across the organization.

Responsibilities:

• Define and drive Airbnb's long-term performance strategy, spanning product performance, infrastructure efficiency, and business objectives for scale and growth
• Lead the architecture and development of performance profiling and instrumentation infrastructure, covering CPU, GPU, memory, request hot paths, utilization, and deployment events, making these capabilities available to all backend teams
• Partner with infrastructure teams across compute, reliability, backend frameworks, and AI Infra to ensure the fleet operates at optimal utilization
• Connect performance outcomes to business objectives and company-wide SLOs, and guide engineering teams in keeping the stack scalable and efficient
• Evaluate emerging hardware and software technologies, engage with the external solutions ecosystem, and advise on build vs. buy decisions in areas of strategic importance
• Mentor and technically uplevel engineers across the organization through design reviews, architectural guidance, and performance best practices

Requirements:

• 12+ years of performance engineering experience in high-scale, high-growth production environments
• Deep understanding of how software and hardware systems interact at scale, including architectural patterns for performance-critical stacks. You know the difference between a bad algorithm and a bad cache eviction policy, and you're comfortable in the kernel, in the JVM, and in a post-mortem
• Strong familiarity with public cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and container orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes)
• Experience with profiling and instrumentation tooling across CPU, GPU, memory, and distributed request tracing
• Demonstrated ability to define performance objectives and drive delivery against company-wide SLOs across multiple organizations
• You know how to move organizations, not just codebases: you've influenced teams that don't report to you, made the case for long-term investments over short-term fixes, and mentored engineers who went on to do exceptional work
• Strong communication and influence skills; comfortable driving technical direction with senior engineering and product leadership