Staff Software Engineer, Transactional Storage Services

Airbnb 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 more than 1 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 Transactional Storage Services team sits within Airbnb's Online Data organization that owns all of Airbnb's online servers and databases. The group is responsible for designing, building, and operating a new source-of-truth: an open-source NewSQL database running on top of stateful Kubernetes. This will host critical Airbnb user, listing, and financial data, with all the essential DB capabilities, like backup restore, CDC, and multi-tenancy.

This stack will also serve as the unified storage backend for Airbnb online data, such as KVStore, GraphDB, etc. With users around the world, reliability, scalability, efficiency, availability, security, and platform evolution are our team's core priorities. As a member of this team, you will work with talented engineers on a modern distributed database system, and act as the resident expert on data storage solutions to provide guidance to our teams on the effective use of technologies, including their usage in large scale architecture and performance optimization.

The Difference You Will Make:

We're looking to add Staff or Senior Staff-level Software Engineers who are both hands-on and capable of solving broad technical challenges in the following areas:

• Database Substrate
  • Design frameworks and maintain the general ecosystem around our NewSQL database's monitoring, permissions, service discovery integration, etc.
  • Be the point of contact for a stateful system running on top of Kubernetes infra interfacing with AWS networking and security APIs.
  • Design, automate, and document database operations; de-noise for the team.
• Database Resiliency
  • Conduct case studies of Airbnb's disaster recovery scenarios, leverage existing open source and/or design software that satisfies Airbnb's requirements on database backup and restore, cross-region data resiliency, PiTR, etc.
  • Collaborate with vendor and open source communities to define the correct paved path in this area.
• Database Server
  • Read and comprehend existing open-source code to understand the system's functionality and architecture. Propose and implement enhancements to the database system, ensuring performance, scalability and reliability. Contribute code, documentation, and bug fixes back to the open-source community.
  • Stay up-to-date with the latest developments in database technologies and distributed systems. Experiment with new tools and technologies to improve the database system.
• Mentorship and leadership in general
  • Participate in regular on-call and interact with key customers to have insights on pain points and gaps, improve team's operational rigor.
  • Coach more junior members of the team and guide them on iterating on designs and solving the right problems, provide insightful design and code review feedback.

Your Expertise:

• 9+ years of relevant industry experience.
• Hands-on experience in building and operating distributed NoSQL or NewSQL databases and services.
• Solid understanding of systems and infrastructure fundamentals.
• Experience in deep diving and then owning a complex code base.
• Knack for writing clean, readable, testable, maintainable code.
• Ability to decompose large-scale distributed systems and figure out monitoring metrics, failure scenarios and debug them in an efficient manner.
• Strong collaboration and communication skills in a remote-working environment.
• Expertise with a public cloud provider (AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Azure) and their Storage, VM, Networking, Security offerings. E.g. external-dns, route53, ebs etc.

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: 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-$259,000 USD