Senior Software Engineer, Dev Tools

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

Dev Tools’ mission is to help Airbnb engineers and AI agents build, validate, review, and ship high-quality software quickly, reliably, and safely. The team is building infrastructure from cloud development environments and agent execution platforms to source control, code review, validation, and polyglot monorepo tooling.

The Difference You Will Make

As a senior engineer on Dev Tools, you will design, build, and operate foundational systems used across Airbnb engineering. You will work on technically challenging infrastructure problems involving distributed systems, Kubernetes, developer workflows, scalability, reliability, and cost efficiency, while partnering with Developer Platform, DevAI, CI/CD, Cloud Infrastructure, and Security. You'll shape technical direction and set the bar for craft on a small, high-impact team.

High leverage: Every improvement you make impacts every engineer at Airbnb and the AI agents running on their behalf.

Greenfield platform work: The async agent execution platform is nascent and you will make foundational scalability decisions.

Clear business stakes: Cloud workspace costs rose significantly; you'll balance developer productivity and infrastructure spend.

Small team, big scope: Work ships quickly and decisions matter.

Responsibilities

• Build and operate cloud development environments and execution platforms for engineers and AI agents.
• Scale Kubernetes-based worker pools, control planes, and APIs for parallel and asynchronous workloads.
• Improve AirDev validation so engineers and agents can test changes quickly before CI.
• Strengthen source-control and code-review systems as PR volume, automation, and concurrency grow.
• Improve developer workflows across build, test, dependency management, and polyglot monorepo tooling.
• Diagnose production issues across distributed systems, networking, storage, and orchestration.
• Set technical direction and make high-stakes architectural decisions with significant ambiguity.
• Mentor engineers and raise the quality bar through code review and design feedback.

Requirements / Your Expertise

• 5-9+ years of industry experience (and/or relevant academic experience).
• Bachelor’s and/or Master’s degree, preferably in CS, or equivalent experience.
• Experience leading and shipping large-scope technical projects in collaboration with multiple experienced engineers.
• Full-cycle developer: ownership building and operating high-scale, distributed systems across the full software lifecycle.
• Familiarity with container and orchestration technologies such as Docker and Kubernetes.
• Excellent communication skills; able to explain complex infrastructure tradeoffs and drive cross-team alignment without formal authority.
• Strong problem solving and debugging skills.
• Passionate about developer productivity and improving developer experience.
• Cloud infrastructure and Kubernetes: experience building systems that run reliably at scale on AWS; knowledge of EKS, EC2, EBS, and cloud networking (VPCs, load balancers, VPN tunneling).
• Platform thinking: experience building infrastructure that other teams build products on top of, with attention to reliability, observability, clear contracts, and graceful failure modes.
• Cost and efficiency: demonstrable experience driving meaningful cost reduction through architectural changes.
• Go, Python, or similar server-side languages (pragmatic about language choice).

Agent/async workloads and developer tooling are listed as pluses:

• Experience or familiarity with operational characteristics of async, autonomous, or long-running compute workloads (pooling, lifecycle management, isolation, secret handling) is a plus.
• Experience building or contributing to developer tools and end-to-end developer experience is a plus.

Preferred Qualifications

Experience in one or more of the following is especially valuable:

• Developer environments, remote development platforms, or sandboxed workload execution.
• Infrastructure for AI agents or asynchronous compute workloads.
• CI/CD, integration testing, build systems, or pre-submit validation.
• Git, GitHub Enterprise, source-control infrastructure, or large-scale repository hosting.
• Code-review systems, policy enforcement, code ownership, or automated review tooling.
• Kubernetes operators, workload scheduling, autoscaling, resource isolation, or capacity management.
• Bazel, monorepo tooling, dependency management, or polyglot build infrastructure.
• Platform APIs, control planes, worker pools, caching systems, or distributed queues.
• Authentication, authorization, secrets management, or secure workload execution.
• Infrastructure cost optimization and capacity planning.

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. You must live in a state where Airbnb, Inc. has a registered entity. If employed by another Airbnb entity, your recruiter will inform you of eligible states.

Compensation

Base pay range: $196,000—$230,000 USD. This role may also be eligible for bonus, equity, benefits, and Employee Travel Credits. The actual base pay is dependent on factors such as training, transferable skills, work experience, business needs and market demands.

Our Commitment to Inclusion & Belonging

Airbnb is committed to working with the broadest talent pool possible and strives to provide a disability inclusive application and interview process. For reasonable accommodations, contact [email protected] with your full name, the role, and the accommodation needed.