Staff Software Engineer, Passport & Commerce (Backend)

Airbnb is a global community-driven travel platform connecting guests and hosts through stays and experiences. The Staff Software Engineer will architect and scale the Passport account platform, defining how account state, eligibility, and entitlements are computed and served. The role will lead technical direction, cross-team architecture, reliability, and mentorship across account, payments, identity, and commerce systems.

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
• While the position is Remote Eligible, you must live in a state where Airbnb, Inc. has a registered entity
• Experience building or operating systems involving financial transactions, entitlements, or other stateful account data is strongly preferred