Staff Software Engineer (Technical Lead), Storage

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

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).

A Typical Day

• As Technical Lead, you will drive the technical vision and execution for our KV stores and caching infrastructure. You will mentor engineers, shape architectural decisions, and ensure the team delivers high-impact solutions. Examples of the types of challenges you will lead include:

• Defining the multi-year technical roadmap for caching and KV infrastructure at Airbnb

• Evolving our KV store from derived-data workloads to support system-of-record use cases, expanding the platform's capabilities and customer base

• Building a multi-tenant caching solution for Airbnb

• Guiding the rearchitecture of our KV write path to remove infrastructure complexity while improving replication lag

• Overseeing frameworks for high-traffic, zero-downtime migrations between critical data platforms

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.

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: reasonableaccommodations@airbnb.com. 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.

How We'll Take Care Of You

Our job titles may span more than one career level. The actual base pay is dependent upon many factors, such as: training, transferable skills, work experience, business needs and market demands. The base pay range is subject to change and may be modified in the future. This role may also be eligible for bonus, equity, benefits, and Employee Travel Credits.

Pay Range

$204,000—$255,000 USD