Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Airbnb is a mission-driven company dedicated to helping create a world where anyone can belong anywhere. The Staff Software Engineer will lead platform-spanning initiatives for the Service Tools team, improving backend developers’ productivity through AI-assisted development, build infrastructure, testing, code modernization, and developer observability. The role also involves setting technical direction, partnering across teams, mentoring engineers, and driving adoption of new capabilities.
Responsibilities
- Owning a multi-quarter, platform-spanning workstream - agentic developer workflows, intelligent build infrastructure, test excellence, codebase modernization, or developer observability - as the DRI other teams come to
- Advancing our AI-assisted development platform: agent skills and tool integrations, the evaluation harnesses that keep them honest, and the telemetry that shows where a human still has to intervene
- Scaling build and merge infrastructure for a very large JVM monorepo: Bazel, remote build execution and caching, merge-queue throughput, test sharding and selection, and the capacity modeling that keeps it all inside budget
- Raising the floor on testing - coverage and mutation signal, AI-authored tests, faster local and pre-merge feedback, and testing contracts teams can hold each other to
- Leading large-scale codebase modernization (JDK and Kotlin toolchain upgrades, test-framework migrations, build-module migrations) through automated refactoring rather than manual toil
- Turning developer and production telemetry into decisions - quantifying where time, spend, and confidence are being lost, and using that to change priorities, including your own team's
- Setting standards by example: code and architecture reviews, design docs, incident reviews and postmortems, and anticipating the reliability problem before it pages anyone
- Helping to shape the technical strategy that directly moves our core metrics (Developer Experience, Developer Velocity, Debuggability, Resilience and Reliability) while reducing cost
- Mentoring and growing engineers on the team in partnership with the engineering manager - multiplying yourself through what you teach, not only what you ship
- Partnering with engineering leaders across every Airbnb org to drive adoption of new capabilities. Your customers are all engineers at Airbnb, and adoption is part of the job
- Representing the work outside Airbnb where it helps: tech blog posts, conference talks, open source, and vendor partnerships
Skills
- A track record of owning platform or infrastructure areas end to end - you have set a technical agenda, aligned partner teams behind it, and delivered it over multiple quarters
- Deep hands-on experience with build systems and large monorepos; Bazel and remote build execution experience is a strong plus
- Extensive JVM experience (Java and/or Kotlin), including the performance, memory, and startup behavior of large builds and test suites
- Fluency with the modern AI-assisted development stack - coding agents, skills and context engineering, tool integrations, and evaluating agent quality rigorously rather than anecdotally
- A measurement instinct: you reach for data to size a problem and to prove the fix worked, and you are skeptical of metrics that flatter the team
- Want to tackle projects with large, open-ended, ambiguous scope, and are comfortable deciding what should exist rather than waiting for a spec
- Raise the level of the engineers around you through code reviews, architecture discussions, mentorship, and clear writing
- Treat operational excellence and technical debt as first-class roadmap items rather than afterthoughts
- Are excited to join an impactful infrastructure team and are motivated to improve your teammates' productivity
- 9+ years of industry experience with a Bachelor's/Master's degree, or 6+ years with a PhD
- Bachelor's and/or Master's degree, preferably in CS, or equivalent experience
- Proficiency in one or more back-end server languages (Java/Kotlin/Ruby/Go/C++/etc.)
- Experienced in architectural patterns of high-scale distributed products/services, such as well-designed APIs, data pipelines and efficient algorithms
- Demonstrated ability to influence stakeholders and drive alignment across teams and functions outside your own reporting line
- Experience or desire to work collaboratively in cross-functional teams with design, product and data science partners
- 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
Benefits
- This role may also be eligible for bonus, equity, benefits, and Employee Travel Credits.
- US - Remote Eligible
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