Senior Software Engineer, Distributed Transactional Database

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.

Role Overview

The Transactional Storage Services team sits within Airbnb’s Online Data organization that owns all of Airbnb's online serving stores and databases. The group is responsible for designing, building and operating a new source-of-truth, open-source NewSql database running on top of stateful Kubernetes that hosts all the critical Airbnb user, listing and financial data, with all the essential DB capabilities such as backup restore, CDC, multi-tenancy.

This stack will also serve as the unified storage backend for Airbnb online data such as MySql, KVStore, GraphDB, etc. With users around the world, reliability, scalability, efficiency, availability, security and platform evolution are the team’s core concerns. As a member of this team you would be working with talented engineers on a modern distributed database system.

Building an entire online data ecosystem around a NewSQL database provides distributed systems and database technologists with a front-row seat to how most companies will be building their data systems in the future.

Responsibilities

• Control Plane and Operations
  • Design frameworks and maintain the ecosystem around the NewSql database’s monitoring, permissions, and service discovery integration.
  • Design and automate critical database operations such as centralized config management, fully automated image building and release certification for upgrades, zero-downtime Blue/Green deployment.
  • Collaborate on defining and delivering a generalized database platform for partner KVStore, ORM, MySql teams.
• Migration and Adoption
  • Deliver zero-downtime forward and reverse replication pipeline with near-real-time consistency between two transactional databases with correctness guarantees.
  • Develop robust failover/failback mechanisms for continuity during outages.
• Backup & Restore
  • Conduct case studies on disaster recovery scenarios and implement software meeting Airbnb’s requirements for backup, restore, cross-region resiliency, and Point-in-Time Recovery.
  • Design cluster topology, restore logic, and ransomware policy to ensure business continuity.

Requirements

• 5+ years of relevant industry experience.
• Solid understanding of distributed systems and infrastructure fundamentals.
• Experience owning and deeply understanding complex code bases.
• Skilled in writing clean, readable, testable, maintainable code.
• Ability to decompose large-scale distributed systems, define monitoring metrics, identify failure scenarios and debug efficiently.
• Strong collaboration and communication skills in remote environments.
• Expertise with public cloud providers (AWS, GCP, Azure) and their storage, VM, networking, security offerings (e.g., external-dns, route53, ebs).

Nice to Have

• Experience in Java, Go, Rust, or C++.
• Experience with robust automation frameworks and tooling.
• Experience with Kubernetes, operator pattern, Helm, and Infrastructure as Code tools like Chef and Terraform.

Location

This position is US - Remote Eligible; occasional onsite or offsite attendance may be required. Candidates must live in a US state where Airbnb has a registered entity (some states excluded).

Benefits

• Competitive base pay plus bonus, equity, benefits, and employee travel credits.
• Inclusive work environment with commitment to disability accommodations and diversity.