Staff Software Engineer - Hosting Services

at Airbnb

GBP 120,000-150,000 per year

SENIOR

✅ On-site

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.

AI API @ 7 Algorithms @ 7 Data Engineering Data Pipelines @ 7 Data Science Distributed Systems @ 7 Experimentation @ 6 System Architecture @ 6

Details

Airbnb's Hosting Services engineering team is expanding its products, partnerships and third-party integrations to make hosting easier, smarter and more rewarding. The role is based in London and involves close collaboration with colleagues in the United States.

Responsibilities

Lead the technical design and development of new customer-facing products, services and third-party integrations from zero to one.
Define the future state of major systems and services, designing flexible, reliable and scalable solutions.
Identify reusable patterns, tooling and AI-enabled development opportunities to accelerate engineering innovation.
Partner with product and design teams from discovery and ideation through development, launch, iteration and product-market fit.
Work across backend systems, APIs, frontend, mobile and distributed architecture, remaining hands-on when needed.
Guide engineers across teams in architectural decisions, technical trade-offs, reliability, performance, efficiency and user experience.
Collaborate with engineering, product, UX, data science, data engineering and business stakeholders.
Challenge existing approaches and identify opportunities to build better products and expand the impact of the engineering organisation.

Requirements

9+ years of software engineering experience, ideally in fast-paced, product-led technology environments.
Strong backend engineering expertise, including large-scale, service-oriented and distributed systems.
Proven experience building customer-facing products from zero to one, including product definition, technical architecture, development and launch.
Experience owning products end to end, iterating on launched products and improving adoption, usability and business outcomes.
Broad full-stack engineering capability across backend, frontend, mobile, APIs and system architecture.
Strong architectural design skills, including high-scale distributed services, well-designed APIs, data pipelines, efficient algorithms and reliable integrations.
Sound technical judgment and the ability to balance delivery speed, experimentation, scalability and long-term engineering quality.
A product-first engineering mindset.