Senior Staff Software Engineer, Tech Foundations

at Airbnb

📍 United States

USD 244,000-305,000 per year

SENIOR

✅ Remote

Tech Stack
Tag name is followed by "@" symbol and proficiency level value. About proficiency levels:

1-2 — basic awareness. Minimal hands-on experience, and a rudimentary understanding of the technology's purpose;

3-6 — daily use. Comfortable and regular usage, capable of handling common tasks and challenges related to the technology;

7-9 — you are an expert, you can teach others, you know all the pitfalls and tricks;

10 — exceptional knowledge, comprehensive understanding, and adeptness in all aspects of the technology, including advanced problem-solving. Think twice before claiming or demanding such level.

Communication @ 7 Design Patterns Distributed Systems Leadership @ 7 SRE @ 6 System Architecture @ 8

Details

Airbnb is seeking a highly skilled and experienced Senior Staff Engineer to join its Site Reliability Engineering team. This role will help develop a best-in-class enterprise-wide SRE program, drive long-term reliability strategy, and ensure the performance and reliability of Airbnb's infrastructure and products. The engineer will work closely with engineering teams to provide tools, processes, and expertise that make services easier to operate and as reliable as possible.

As a senior technical individual contributor, this role focuses on solving broad infrastructure challenges while contributing hands-on code and participating in architecture and design.

Responsibilities

Develop a long-term roadmap and vision for reliability and serve as a strategic thought partner within the organization.
Design, implement, and influence company-wide SRE architecture, innovation, engineering practices, and standards.
Create scalable incident management processes and reduce operational toil associated with incident response.
Foster an SRE and reliability model that accounts for engineering teams' ownership of their services.
Optimize infrastructure and platforms to ensure systems are highly available and performant.
Develop production readiness standards to ensure service reliability.
Automate processes wherever possible and configure systems as code.
Predict future failures and proactively mitigate them.
Advocate for and implement reliable design patterns, including circuit breakers and graceful degradation.
Build a culture in which reliability is a proactive mindset, identifying patterns and opportunities to improve leverage and tooling.
Partner with engineering leaders and product engineering teams on design and implementation choices for large-scale distributed systems.
Support learning from incidents through blameless postmortems.
Mentor and lead Site Reliability Engineers through servant leadership, mentorship, advocacy, and allyship.

Requirements

Bachelor's, master's, or doctoral degree in computer science, a related field, or equivalent work experience.
12+ years of software engineering experience, including significant experience in system architecture and design at consumer-facing technology companies.
5+ years of experience as a senior-level technical lead or architect, driving technical direction and strategy across multiple teams or projects.
Strong leadership, communication, and collaboration skills, with a track record of working effectively across teams and organizations.
Demonstrated expertise building and scaling high-availability systems and platforms.
Deep understanding of multi-cloud environments.
Hands-on software engineering and architecture/design experience.

Benefits

The role may be eligible for bonus, equity, benefits, and Employee Travel Credits. Airbnb provides reasonable accommodations throughout the recruitment process for applicants with disabilities.