Staff Software Engineer, Distributed Transactional Database

at Airbnb
📍 United States
USD 191,000-225,000 per year
SENIOR
✅ Hybrid

SCRAPED

Used Tools & Technologies

Not specified

Required Skills & Competences ?

Security @ 4 Chef @ 4 Go @ 4 Kubernetes @ 4 MySQL @ 4 Terraform @ 4 GCP @ 4 Java @ 4 NoSQL @ 4 Distributed Systems @ 7 Hiring @ 4 AWS @ 4 Azure @ 4 Communication @ 7 Helm @ 4 Networking @ 4 Rust @ 4 Debugging @ 4

Details

Airbnb's Transactional Storage Services team in the Online Data organization is building a new open-source NewSQL database running on stateful Kubernetes to serve as a unified source-of-truth for critical Airbnb user, listing and financial data. The team focuses on reliability, scalability, efficiency, availability, security and platform evolution. As a Staff Software Engineer on this team you will work on a modern distributed database system and help build an online data ecosystem around a NewSQL database.

Responsibilities

  • Read, comprehend and own large open-source codebases related to query compilation, server behavior and change data capture (CDC).
  • Propose and implement enhancements to improve performance, scalability and reliability; contribute code, documentation and bug fixes back to the open-source community.
  • Investigate and debug operational issues across storage, query and routing layers using metrics, telemetry, logs and events; participate in incident response and write postmortems.
  • Design and maintain control-plane and operational frameworks: monitoring, permissions, service discovery integration, centralized/hierarchical config management, automated image building and release certification, and zero-downtime Blue/Green deployment processes.
  • Define and deliver generalized database platform integrations for partner systems (KVStore, ORM, MySQL teams) and enable migration and adoption across stacks.
  • Deliver zero-downtime forward and reverse replication pipelines with near-real-time consistency and correctness guarantees across transactional boundaries; design robust failover/failback mechanisms for outages.
  • Participate in on-call rotations, improve operational rigor, and mentor and coach more junior engineers through design and code review feedback.

Requirements

  • 9+ years of relevant industry experience.
  • Hands-on experience building and operating distributed NoSQL or NewSQL databases and services.
  • Strong understanding of distributed systems and infrastructure fundamentals.
  • Proven ability to deep-dive and own a complex code base; write clean, testable and maintainable code.
  • Experience decomposing large-scale distributed systems, defining monitoring metrics, analyzing failure scenarios and debugging efficiently.
  • Strong collaboration and communication skills for remote-working environments.
  • Expertise with a public cloud provider (AWS, GCP or Azure) and related Storage, VM, Networking and Security offerings (examples mentioned include external-dns, Route 53, EBS).

Nice to haves:

  • Experience in Java, Go, Rust or C++.
  • Experience building robust automation frameworks and tooling.
  • Experience with Kubernetes (including stateful workloads), operator pattern, Helm, and Infrastructure-as-Code tools such as Chef and Terraform.
  • Experience with database schema design and query performance profiling.

Benefits

  • Base pay range listed for this role: $191,000 — $225,000 USD.
  • Role may be eligible for bonus, equity, benefits, and Employee Travel Credits.
  • Remote-eligible within the United States (must live in a state where Airbnb, Inc. has a registered entity); occasional office work or offsites may be required as agreed with manager.
  • Inclusive hiring and accommodations for applicants with disabilities (reasonable accommodations contact provided).