Senior Software Engineer, Storage

Details

The Online Data organization empowers Airbnb's builders to create real-time data experiences through intuitive data interfaces and tools. Within Online Data, the Transactional Storage Services team owns Airbnb's online serving stores and databases.

The team designs, builds, and operates a source-of-truth, open-source NewSQL database running on stateful Kubernetes. The database hosts critical user, listing, and financial data, as well as backup and restore, change data capture (CDC), and multi-tenancy capabilities.

Responsibilities

Airbnb is hiring across two teams within Transactional Storage Services:

• Database Kernel: Own performance, reliability, and stability for Airbnb's NewSQL engine at scale, spanning storage, query execution, consensus, CDC, and central routing and shard management. Investigate database internals and SQL latency and availability issues, and partner with the open-source database vendor on root cause analysis and upstream contributions.
• Database Adoption: Build infrastructure that moves Airbnb's data workloads onto NewSQL, including eventually consistent two-way replication between databases, fully automated failover and failback, and a migration operator. Collaborate across Kernel, SRE, ORM, KV, and SQL interface teams to support internal customers.
• Investigate query and storage layers to explain latency differences between B-tree and LSM-based storage engines.
• Design and implement traffic prioritization at the storage layer for connection pooling.
• Validate and safely roll out CDC architecture while guaranteeing full transactional correctness across shards.
• Build frameworks and tooling for the NewSQL database, including monitoring, observability, permissions, and service discovery integration.

Requirements

• 5+ years of experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems, including storage, data ingestion, backup and restore, or streaming systems.
• Hands-on experience with database or storage internals, such as query execution, storage engines, replication, or consensus.
• Ability to own and investigate a complex codebase, ideally an open-source codebase.
• Experience maintaining, analyzing, and debugging high-severity production incidents.
• Ability to write clean, testable, and maintainable code.
• Strong collaboration and communication skills in a remote working environment.
• Strong ownership and a consistent track record of delivery.

Compensation

The base pay range is $196,000–$230,000 USD per year. The role may also be eligible for bonus, equity, benefits, and Employee Travel Credits. Actual base pay depends on factors including training, transferable skills, work experience, business needs, and market demands.

Inclusion and Accommodations

Airbnb is committed to working with the broadest talent pool possible and providing a disability-inclusive application and interview process. Reasonable accommodations are available throughout the recruitment process.