Staff Backend Engineer, Media Foundation

Details

Airbnb was born in 2007 when two Hosts welcomed three guests to their San Francisco home, and has since grown to over 4 million Hosts who have welcomed more than 1 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:

Media - images & videos, are critical to the success of Airbnb as it enables guests to make informed booking decisions, helps hosts showcase their listings effectively, and enhances trust and engagement across the platform. The Media Foundation team sits within Airbnb’s Client & Product Foundation organization. The group is responsible for building & operating end to end media infrastructure and solutions - from ingestion, processing, delivery & playback components, that power images, videos, and other rich media across the platform.

We focus on delivering high quality, performant & cost-efficient media experiences through innovative media solutions leveraging content optimization techniques & caching strategies. Additionally, we drive product innovation by exploring new ways to enhance media experiences through AI-driven enhancements, interactive media formats, and improved media accessibility.

The Difference You Will Make:

As a backend Staff Backend Software Engineer, you will play a key role in designing, building, and optimizing the next-generation media infrastructure at Airbnb. You will lead technical initiatives, drive architectural decisions, and work cross-functionally with engineering, product, and infrastructure teams to enhance Airbnb’s media capabilities. This is an opportunity to work on complex, large-scale distributed systems that process and serve billions of media assets efficiently.

A Typical Day:

• Design and implement scalable, high-performance backend services for media processing, storage, and delivery.
• Lead architectural decisions and drive technical excellence in media infrastructure participating in regular on-call & improving team’s operational rigor.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams both internal including frontend, mobile, and infrastructure engineers as well as vendors, to enhance media-related experiences.
• Mentor and guide engineers, fostering a culture of technical excellence and innovation.
• You will ideate and prototype solutions that address concerns that are unique to the Airbnb Media hosting and media processing.

Your Expertise:

• 9+ years of software development experience in a fast paced tech environment with a minimum of 3 years working with media systems.
• Strong programming (Java, Kotlin or equivalent) skills for hands-on IC work.
• You have excellent communication skills and the ability to work well within a team and with teams across the engineering, product & design organizations.
• Experience working with image processing or content video transcoding.
• Experience AI/ML-based media processing.
• Knowledge of content moderation, media compliance, and rights management.
• Passion to level-up those around you through curiosity and fostering a collaborative and inclusive team environment.

How We'll Take Care of You:

Our job titles may span more than one career level. The actual base pay is dependent upon many factors, such as: training, transferable skills, work experience, business needs and market demands. The base pay range is subject to change and may be modified in the future. This role may also be eligible for bonus, equity, benefits, and Employee Travel Credits.