Staff Software Engineer, Passport & Commerce (Backend)

Airbnb is a global community-driven travel platform connecting hosts and guests through stays and experiences. The Staff Software Engineer will architect and evolve the Passport account platform, focusing on account state, eligibility, and entitlements at scale while setting technical direction, collaborating across teams, and ensuring reliability and data integrity.

Responsibilities:

• Design and evolve the core services and data models that track account state, eligibility, and entitlements across millions of accounts
• Partner with product and design to translate new product concepts into scalable, extensible technical designs
• Collaborate with Payments and Wallet engineering to ensure credits, discounts, and host-funded programs settle correctly end-to-end
• Set technical direction and lead design reviews across a growing team, mentoring engineers and raising the bar on system design
• Drive cross-team architecture decisions with Identity & Privacy and Profile & Community teams to keep account state consistent with Airbnb's broader Passport model
• Identify and resolve reliability, scalability, and data-integrity risks before they affect guests or hosts

Requirements:

• 9+ years of experience designing and scaling complex, distributed backend systems, with a proven track record of technical leadership in high-growth environments
• A track record as a technical leader who has set architecture direction for a team or domain — not only delivered individual features
• Deep expertise in distributed systems fundamentals, including data consistency, caching, service decomposition, and API design at scale
• Experience mentoring senior engineers and influencing technical decisions across multiple teams
• Comfort operating with ambiguity on a newly formed team, including helping define team scope, roadmap, and technical foundations
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, with experience driving alignment across engineering, product, and design partners
• 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
• Experience building or operating systems involving financial transactions, entitlements, or other stateful account data is strongly preferred