Senior Staff Engineer, App Foundation

The Community You Will Join:

Airbnb is powered by our Host and Guest communities. Our Users, Listings and Platforms team is a group responsible for creating new products for our Guests and Hosts. The App Foundation team, part of the Users, Listings and Platforms org, is at the forefront of building world-class comprehensive application frameworks, services and platforms to easily transform and serve data to the application stack. Learn more about our main product, Riverbed, here.

The Difference You Will Make:

We are seeking a highly skilled and motivated product engineering leader who is passionate about making a difference through their work. We are on a journey to build company-wide large-scale, high-performance batch and streaming data processing systems that power Airbnb's Guest and Host products, and machine learning models. As a technical leader in this space, you will have the opportunity to shape the technical and product directions for your direct team and the broader org.  

Things you will do:

• Drive the development of batch and streaming data processing systems 
• Work at the intersection of online and offline data, storage layers, and stream processing to create innovative solutions.
• Contribute to and work with open-source software, making an impact on the industry.
• Lead the execution of our next-generation architecture redesign initiatives.
• Evangelize high-quality software engineering practices towards building data infrastructure and pipelines at scale.

A Typical Day: 

• Work with partners across orgs (client, backend, ML, and analytics teams) to design and deliver high-quality systems.
• Create paved paths and best practices for data processing systems and drive alignment and adoption across the company
• Lead efforts to architect, prototype, build and launch solutions for serving data pipelines that power product engineers across Airbnb to be productive and create delightful user experiences. 
• Provide critical input in team roadmap and technical direction.
• Influence and collaborate with stakeholders to adopt team goals and roadmaps.
• Build efficient and backend solutions that are reliable, performant and scalable.
• Mentor engineers both within and outside the team.

Your Expertise:

• 12+ years of full-time work experience in software engineering and distributed systems. 
• Strong expertise in batch & real-time data processing technologies like Flink, Spark, and building high-performance, data-intensive systems.
• Hands-on experience with Kafka and building services for Kafka at scale.
• Proficiency in designing and implementing GraphQL-based APIs.
• Strong knowledge of relational databases,  SQL, and experience with Elasticsearch.
• Experience with Java / Scala / Spark and operating on data at the petabyte scale.
• Demonstrated ability to work effectively across team boundaries and provide guidance to individual teams.
• Excellent communication skills, both written and verbal, with a track record of collaborating with product managers, data scientists, and other engineering leaders and teams.

Your Location:

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.

Our Commitment To Inclusion & Belonging:

Airbnb is committed to working with the broadest talent pool possible. We believe diverse ideas foster innovation and engagement, and allow us to attract creatively-led people, and to develop the best products, services and solutions. All qualified individuals are encouraged to apply.

We strive to also provide a disability inclusive application and interview process. If you are a candidate with a disability and require reasonable accommodation in order to submit an application, please contact us at: [email protected]. Please include your full name, the role you’re applying for and the accommodation necessary to assist you with the recruiting process. 

We ask that you only reach out to us if you are a candidate whose disability prevents you from being able to complete our online application.