Staff Software Engineer, Infrastructure

Airbnb is a global platform connecting hosts and guests through stays and experiences. The Staff Software Engineer will lead engineering efforts for online data infrastructure, including distributed storage, caching, and data ingestion platforms. The role involves guiding cross-functional projects, shaping technical strategy, mentoring engineers, and maintaining operational reliability.

Responsibilities:

• A highly available, low-latency, distributed, multi-tenant KV store for Airbnb. This platform is used by user profiling, Search, ML, and pricing teams, supporting millions of read QPS and providing 99.9+% availability across thousands of customer tables
• A set of control planes and clients that manage ElasticCache clusters for hundreds of Airbnb production clusters, at million+ IOPS and million+ indexing QPS
• A scalable, reliable, performant distributed coordination service supporting many mission-critical systems (MySQL, Redis, Kafka, Flink, Druid, Zookeeper, etc)
• As a member of this team you would be working with talented engineers on cutting edge technologies to help support Airbnb’s business. You will be the resident expert on the online data exports platform and guide and collaborate with our internal product teams to effectively use the platform
• Lead a team of developers to deliver multi-quarter cross functional projects
• Stay up-to-date with the latest developments in data ingestion systems and evaluate and incorporate new technologies and methodologies to improve the existing data ingestion architecture/solution
• Influence the team’s and organization’s long-term roadmap and strategy
• Mentor and coach team members, providing guidance and support to enhance their skills and technical standards in the team
• Raise operational standards by effectively and proactively identifying, debugging and fixing operational issues. Be part of the oncall rotation for the Ingestion team

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
• 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