Principal Software Engineer, Performance

Details

Overview

Airbnb’s Infrastructure Performance team ensures that growth doesn’t come at the cost of speed, reliability, or efficiency. Performance is treated as a first-class engineering property—measurable, continuously improved, and enforced across the software lifecycle.

This is the most senior performance engineering role at the company. In this role, you won’t be handed a roadmap—you will build one.

The Performance team owns performance across the full stack, including CPU and GPU fleet utilization, backend service efficiency, end-to-end request latency, storage, ML infrastructure, and observability. Responsibilities include instrumenting and profiling at scale, discovering hot paths, shaping how teams think about performance SLOs, and influencing build-vs.-buy decisions for emerging hardware and software.

The team also builds tooling that helps every backend team self-serve performance insights, scaling good decisions beyond your direct involvement.

On the product side, as the TL for the Performance team, you will partner with engineering teams to tie infrastructure performance to user experience and business outcomes.

Responsibilities

What you’ll do:

• Define and drive Airbnb’s long-term performance strategy, spanning product performance, infrastructure efficiency, and business objectives for scale and growth.
• Lead the architecture and development of performance profiling and instrumentation infrastructure, covering CPU, GPU, memory, request hot paths, utilization, and deployment events—making these capabilities available to all backend teams.
• Partner with infrastructure teams across compute, reliability, backend frameworks, and AI Infra to ensure the fleet operates at optimal utilization.
• Connect performance outcomes to business objectives and company-wide SLOs, and guide engineering teams in keeping the stack scalable and efficient.
• Evaluate emerging hardware and software technologies, engage with the external solutions ecosystem, and advise on build vs. buy decisions in areas of strategic importance.
• Mentor and technically uplevel engineers across the organization through design reviews, architectural guidance, and performance best practices.

Requirements

• 12+ years of performance engineering experience in high-scale, high-growth production environments.
• Deep understanding of how software and hardware systems interact at scale, including architectural patterns for performance-critical stacks; comfort with the kernel, the JVM, and post-mortems.
• Strong familiarity with public cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and container orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes).
• Experience with profiling and instrumentation tooling across CPU, GPU, memory, and distributed request tracing.
• Demonstrated ability to define performance objectives and drive delivery against company-wide SLOs across multiple organizations.
• Ability to influence organizations, not just codebases: influencing teams that don’t report to you, advocating for long-term investments over short-term fixes, and mentoring engineers.
• Strong communication and influence skills; comfortable driving technical direction with senior engineering and product leadership.

Your Location

This position is US - Remote Eligible. The role may include occasional work at an Airbnb office or attendance at offsites, as agreed with your manager. While remote eligible, you must live in a state where Airbnb, Inc. has a registered entity.

How We’ll Take Care of You

• Job titles may span more than one career level.
• Base pay depends on factors including training, transferable skills, work experience, business needs, and market demands.
• Base pay range is subject to change.
• This role may be eligible for bonus, equity, benefits, and Employee Travel Credits.

Pay Range:

• $292,000—$365,000 USD

Offices:

• United States