Senior Software Engineer, Tech Foundations

Details

Airbnb’s Service Mesh team within Network Platform owns the infrastructure that makes service-to-service communication secure, reliable, and observable. The team builds and operates systems supporting service discovery, load balancing, access control, traffic failover, and routing for thousands of applications and backend services.

You will work on cloud-native networking technologies and contribute to infrastructure initiatives including global traffic load balancing, disaster recovery, next-generation service mesh, cross-region gateways, and edge security. Airbnb works closely with the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, the open-source community, and peer companies on cloud-native engineering challenges at scale.

Responsibilities

• Define and deliver the roadmap for mesh capabilities, including routing, security, policy, resilience, and multi-region failover.
• Set and track SLOs and SLAs for availability and performance, and drive data-informed improvements.
• Build and mentor a strong engineering team while establishing engineering excellence, code health, and operational rigor.
• Align with Security, Edge/Traffic, Compute, and Developer Platform teams on cross-cutting initiatives and standards.
• Mature incident management, post-incident learning, change management, and safe rollout practices.
• Plan capacity and investments to support growth while optimizing efficiency and cost.
• Build and operate high-scale, distributed systems across the full software life cycle.
• Lead teams responsible for production infrastructure and on-call operations.

Requirements

• 5+ years of relevant software development industry experience in a fast-paced, high-growth technology environment.
• Experience running large-scale networking systems and software, such as edge proxies, DNS, CDNs, or network gateways.
• Experience with Istio and Envoy is a plus.
• Strong full-cycle development experience with ownership of high-scale, distributed systems.
• Excellent communication skills and the ability to collaborate effectively across engineering teams.
• Strong problem-solving skills and experience leading a team responsible for production infrastructure on-call.
• Passion for efficiency, availability, technical quality, and system quality.

Location

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

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.

Inclusion and Accommodations

Airbnb encourages qualified applicants from diverse backgrounds and provides reasonable accommodations throughout the recruitment and interview process for applicants with disabilities.