About the role
Airbnb was born in 2007 when two hosts welcomed three guests to their San Francisco home, and has since grown to over 5 million hosts who have welcomed over 2 billion guest arrivals in almost every country across the globe. Every day, hosts offer unique stays and experiences that make it possible for guests to connect with communities in a more authentic way.
The Community You Will Join
At Airbnb, our mission is to create a world where anyone can belong anywhere. The Users Foundation team owns User Data at Airbnb — the identity and account information behind every guest and host interaction on the platform. We build and operate the core service that acts as the gateway for how other teams across Airbnb read and write user data. Because nearly every team touches user data in some way, our systems sit at the center of the platform, and reliability, correctness, and scale aren't nice-to-haves, they're the job.
The Difference You Will Make
As a Senior Software Engineer on the Users Foundation team, you will design and build distributed systems that handle enormous scale with strict correctness and reliability requirements. In this role, you will work closely with engineering teams across Airbnb to ship changes safely to infrastructure they depend on. This is a high-ownership role: you will set technical direction for your projects, lead tradeoff discussions with partner teams, and have real influence over how foundational systems evolve.
A Typical Day
- Design, build, and operate backend services and APIs that are core dependencies across Airbnb's platform
- Lead multi-engineer projects end-to-end, from problem definition through rollout and operations
- Improve the reliability and scalability of systems that handle account data and events at high volume
- Partner with engineering teams across the company to plan and safely execute changes to shared infrastructure
- Mentor other engineers and help raise the bar on code quality, testing, and operational excellence
Your Expertise
- 5+ years of professional software engineering experience, with experience owning production services end-to-end
- Strong fundamentals in distributed systems, including messaging/eventing, data consistency, and service reliability patterns
- Experience building and operating high-traffic backend services
- Track record of leading ambiguous, multi-month projects from problem definition through delivery