Senior Software Engineer, Cities

Details

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 Cities team serves guests, hosts and regulators to ensure successful global compliance with local regulations. Our mission is to scalably sustain nights booked and growth rate in tens of thousands of cities to meet short-term rental regulation around the globe.

Products owned by the team include:

• The tier 0/1 flows end-to-end host experience on regulation registration flow, and downstream enforcement mechanisms to help Airbnb comply with regulations.
• The government-facing product — the City Portal — from end to end, establishing relationships with governments around the world.
• Foundational quality services which power LVF, requirement services and the Nightcap platform which feeds data to critical pages such as PDP and Host Calendar.

The working environment:

• Inclusive and supportive work environment promoting sustainable engineering practices, well-being, and healthy team dynamics.
• Career development, internal mobility, mentoring, and leadership development opportunities.
• Opportunities to launch and expand products across global markets and work on greenfield problems.

The Difference You Will Make

This is a high-impact opportunity to help develop one of the most critical domains at Airbnb. As a senior member of the team you will play a pivotal role building scalable and flexible systems that can model today’s regulations and adapt to future changes. The system integrates across guest- and host-facing systems, the government portal, and internal tools. You will also engage industry and governmental partners to drive technology strategy to scale compliance and help establish technology standards.

A Typical Day / Responsibilities

• Join a talented group of engineers and collaborate closely on high-impact technical initiatives to keep Airbnb scalable, performant, and reliable.
• Build microservices and APIs to drive platform integrations across web and mobile platforms.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to build interfaces and systems that evolve to meet critical business needs.
• Help set up and lead working group sessions; collaborate on current and upcoming projects including proposal and design doc reviews and roadmap planning.
• Build platforms — infrastructure, applications, and tools — and gain expertise in distributed systems, large compute clusters, and petabyte-scale storage infrastructure.
• Work on scaling distributed applications in a highly-available 24x7 environment, making architectural trade-offs and applying design patterns with disciplined execution.

Requirements / Your Expertise

• Bachelor’s and/or Master’s degree, preferably in Computer Science, or equivalent experience.
• Over 7 years of industry experience in software development.
• Passion and ability to learn quickly.
• Experience building real-world systems and demonstrable knowledge in one or more of: TypeScript, Java, Kotlin, Python.
• Familiarity with frontend web technologies (HTML, CSS, React, GraphQL).
• Good understanding of LLM and transformer architectures (GPT, BERT, LLaMA). Experience with fine-tuning techniques and hyperparameter optimization. Experience with ML libraries and frameworks such as Hugging Face, Transformers, or LangChain.
• Exposure to architectural patterns of high-scale web applications, including well-designed APIs, data pipelines, and efficient algorithms.

Soft skills:

• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills; ability to break down complex, ambiguous problems into structured components and apply data-driven reasoning.
• Self-driven with strong project management abilities; comfortable owning initiatives end-to-end, driving alignment across stakeholders, managing timelines, and removing roadblocks.
• Strong communication skills across technical and non-technical audiences; able to articulate ideas, gather requirements, and collaborate with Operations, Design, Product, and Data Science.

Location and Work Policy

• 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.
• If remote, you must live in a state where Airbnb, Inc. has a registered entity; excluded states list is maintained on the careers site.

Compensation and Benefits

• Pay Range: $210,000—$220,000 USD (base pay range). The actual base pay depends on factors like training, transferable skills, work experience, business needs, and market demands.
• This role may also be eligible for bonus, equity, benefits, and Employee Travel Credits.

Our Commitment to Inclusion & Belonging

Airbnb is committed to working with the broadest talent pool possible. Diverse ideas foster innovation and engagement. All qualified individuals are encouraged to apply. Reasonable accommodations for candidates with disabilities are available via [email protected].