Senior Staff Software Engineer, Tech Foundations

The Community You Will Join:

We are a community based on connection and belonging - a community that was born in 2007 when two hosts welcomed three guests to their San Francisco home, and has since grown to over 4 million hosts who have welcomed over 1.4 billion guest arrivals to over 100,000 cities and towns in almost every country and region across the globe. Hosts on Airbnb are everyday people who share their worlds to provide guests with the feeling of connection and being at home. We strive to connect people and places.

Airbnb has five stakeholders and is designed with all of them in mind. Along with employees and shareholders, we serve hosts, guests, and the communities in which they live. We intend to make long-term decisions considering all of our stakeholders because their collective success is key for our business to thrive.

The Difference You Will Make:

Airbnb is seeking a highly skilled and experienced Senior Staff Engineer to join their Site Reliability Engineering team. The Senior Staff Engineer is a key member of the technical team who will help facilitate a best-in-class enterprise-wide SRE program that enables the business. They will be responsible for driving the continued development of a long-term Reliability strategy and for ensuring the overall performance and reliability of Airbnb’s infrastructure and products. Additionally, they will work closely with engineering teams to provide tools, processes, and expertise to make services easy to operate and as reliable as possible.

As a senior technical individual contributor, the Senior Staff Engineer will bring a unique skill set and experience to the organization, and work to solve broader technical challenges around infrastructure. They will lend expertise to specific teams and deep dive into projects as needed.

Airbnb’s engineering organization values everyone’s input and ideas. Even at a senior level, all Software Engineers at Airbnb are expected to be hands on and contribute code and/or be involved in the architecture/design.

A Typical Day:

• Develop a roadmap with a longer-term vision for Reliability and serve as a strategic thought partner within the organization.
• Design, implement and influence company-wide SRE architecture, innovation, engineering, and standards.
• Create incident management processes that can scale with the organization as it continues its rapid growth. Assess how the organization manages incidents and responds to them; reduce operational toil stemming from incident management.
• Foster the SRE/Reliability model that takes into consideration the nuances of an engineering culture that has a great sense of ownership over their services.
• Bring a strong customer focus to the Reliability function, centered on optimizing the infrastructure and platform, and ensuring systems are highly available and performant.
• Develop Production Readiness standards to ensure service reliability. Automate as much as possible and always configure as code. Predict future failures and work proactively to mitigate them. Advocate and implement reliable design patterns (circuit breakers, graceful degradation, etc.)
• Culture, Influence and Team Leadership
• Create a culture where Reliability is a state of mind, instilling a proactive approach to seeing patterns and opportunities to increase leverage and tooling.
• Build deep partnerships with engineering leaders. Work closely with product engineering teams on design and implementation choices of large-scale distributed systems.
• Partner with the broader organization to learn from incidents through a blameless post mortem process.
• Mentor and lead other Site Reliability Engineers. Uplevel and support others with servant leadership, mentorship, advocacy, and allyship.

Your Expertise:

• BS, MS, or PhD in computer science, related field, or equivalent work experience.
• 12+ years of software engineering experience, with a significant portion dedicated to system architecture and design in consumer-facing technology companies.
• Strong leadership skills, with 5+ years of experience as a senior-level technical lead or architect, driving the technical direction and strategy across multiple teams or projects.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with a proven track record of working effectively across teams and organizations.
• Demonstrated expertise in building and scaling high-availability systems and platforms, with a deep understanding of multi-cloud environments