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Staff Software Engineer, Tech Foundations

Lead a team to deliver critical online data solutions for Airbnb's infrastructure with a focus on distributed systems.

Location
United States
Compensation
$204k–$255k/yr
Level
staff
Type
full time · Remote

Posted by employer 6 months ago

First seen on Joblaze 1 day ago

Last verified on the company career page 1 day ago

What you'll build

  • Lead a team of developers
  • Deliver multi-quarter cross functional projects
  • Guide internal product teams
  • Raise operational standards
  • Be part of the oncall rotation

Must have

  • 9+ years of relevant industry experience
  • Proven track record of leading and mentoring engineering teams
  • Deep expertise in distributed systems
  • Demonstrated ability to collaborate and influence across teams

Requirements

Experience
9+ years

Not disclosed in this posting: visa sponsorship.

Benefits

Equity/Stock Options Remote Work

Joblaze summary

In this role, the Staff Software Engineer will lead a team focused on enhancing Airbnb's online data ingestion systems, ensuring reliable and scalable data exports for various internal teams. Key skills include deep expertise in distributed systems and multi-tenant storage, along with a strong background in mentoring and technical leadership. This position is ideal for seasoned engineers with over nine years of experience who can navigate complex codebases and influence technical strategies across teams. The role is part of a collaborative environment within Airbnb's Online Data organization, which emphasizes real-time data solutions.

Joblaze insights

  • Listed yesterday — first seen on Joblaze September 25, 2026. Last confirmed on Airbnb's careers page September 25, 2026.
  • Salary band is above the typical range for Backend roles (median ~$180,000).
  • Starts above 58% of 31 comparable staff backend roles in United States that list distributed systems we track (median $190,000 across 15 companies). See distributed systems salary trends
  • distributed systems appears in 12.4% of 291 comparable staff backend roles in United States; infrastructure appears in 1.4% of 291 comparable staff backend roles in United States.

Quick facts

Is the Staff Software Engineer, Tech Foundations role remote?
Yes — Airbnb lists this as a fully remote position.
What's the salary range?
Airbnb lists $204,000–$255,000 for this role.
How much experience is required?
At least 9 years of relevant experience for this Staff Software Engineer, Tech Foundations role.
What's the tech stack?
Joblaze extracted these technologies from the posting: distributed systems, infrastructure, multi-tenant storage.
What seniority level is this role?
Airbnb targets staff-level candidates for this position.
Is this full-time or contract?
Full-time for this Staff Software Engineer, Tech Foundations role at Airbnb.

From the original posting

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:

The Online Data organization ensures Airbnb customers are delighted in experiences backed by real-time data. We empower Airbnb’s builders to create these experiences by offering intuitive data interfaces and tools without the need to be database experts.

The Difference You Will Make:

We’re hiring across multiple teams within our organization. Explore the section below to learn more about each team and the opportunities available.

The KV Stores & Caching team within Airbnb's Online Data org owns and operates critical pieces of Airbnb's online serving storage systems. Specifically, the team owns and is responsible for:

  • 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).

The mission of the Ingestion team in the Online Database Infrastructure org is to provide a managed, reliable, performant and scalable platform for exporting data out of Airbnb’s online databases for asynchronous processing. The team currently builds and operates two managed solutions - one for near real time access to change logs (CDC) and another to provide periodic mutation and full table snapshots.

  • 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.

Your Expertise:

  • 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.

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.

How We'll Take Care of You:

Pay Range
$204,000—$255,000 USD

Standard company text repeated across Airbnb's postings is omitted here.

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