Staff Software Engineer, Event Logging

Details

The event logging team owns Airbnb’s platform for capturing user activity events, including page views, searches, and backend events, across every client and backend service. The platform transforms raw user activity logs into high-quality data available both near-real-time and long-term, enabling engineering teams across Airbnb to produce and consume event data.

As a member of a diverse and distributed team, you will use deep backend expertise to drive the technical direction of event logging at Airbnb. You will own initiatives spanning the logging platform, identify high-impact opportunities, establish a technical vision, and guide delivery through products and tooling used across the organization.

Responsibilities

• Collaborate with partner teams to understand their pain points, prototype proposed solutions, and drive adoption of logging products and tooling.
• Own the technical direction and roadmap for a major area of the logging platform, aligning it with broader organizational priorities.
• Lead investments in new technical capabilities that enable product innovation.
• Create and present design, product, and architecture documents, and provide feedback on others’ work.
• Translate prototypes into high-quality, scalable, and maintainable production code through iterative development.
• Stay current with industry trends, technologies, and best practices, particularly in logging and observability.
• Mentor and provide technical guidance to engineers while fostering knowledge sharing and continuous learning.

Requirements

• 9+ years of industry engineering experience.
• Experience building internal infrastructure, particularly in event logging and observability, preferred.
• Strong communication, organizational, and collaboration skills with cross-functional teams.
• Deep expertise in one or more backend/server languages, such as Java, Kotlin, or C++.
• Track record of architecting high-traffic backend systems.
• Ability to work outside your usual comfort zone and motivation for personal growth.
• Expertise developing solutions to ambiguous problems.
• Experience mentoring and growing engineers across an organization and driving software development best practices.
• Demonstrated ability to influence engineering strategy and shape technical priorities across a large organization.

Compensation

• Base pay range: $212,000–$265,000 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.