Staff Software Engineer, Performance

Details

Airbnb's Infrastructure Performance team optimizes performance across the fleet and throughout the backend stack. The team's scope includes Kubernetes services, observability infrastructure, data pipelines, and ML infrastructure. The team evaluates hardware and JVM performance, builds performance observability, and delivers cross-team performance improvements to reduce latency and operating cost. This role reports to the Senior Engineering Manager, Infrastructure.

Responsibilities

• Collaborate with cost and performance cross-functional partners and engineers across teams to optimize infrastructure performance and operating cost.
• Work with large services to optimize performance through profiling, analysis, and tuning.
• Build distributed performance tooling to collect performance data and develop automation to surface bottlenecks.
• Lead continuous load testing in production to identify performance bottlenecks and vulnerabilities of airbnb.com.
• Troubleshoot and resolve production performance issues to minimize latency for customers.
• Modernize Airbnb’s software stack across layers.
• Build infrastructure to deploy the latest hardware to AWS Kubernetes clusters to minimize fleet footprint.

Requirements / Your Expertise

• 10+ years of relevant performance optimization industry experience in a fast-paced, high-growth tech environment.
• Working knowledge of processor vectorization activation for various COTS applications.
• Deep software tuning and optimization experience; Java preferred (but other major languages such as C++ are acceptable).
• Experience evaluating and tuning the JVM with respect to hardware configurations and OS features.
• Expertise in using metrics to uncover performance issues and strong performance debugging skills.
• Familiarity with system hardware as it pertains to performance.
• Familiarity with a public cloud provider (AWS, GCP, Azure) and their IaaS offerings (e.g., EC2).
• Familiarity with container and orchestration technologies such as Docker and Kubernetes.
• Experience with load testing software (in production or via benchmarking).
• Excellent communication skills and ability to work across engineering teams.
• Passion for efficiency and performance.

Location & Work Policy

• This position is US - Remote Eligible. The role may include occasional work at an Airbnb office or attendance at offsites, as agreed with your manager.
• Candidates must live in a U.S. state where Airbnb, Inc. has a registered entity (some states are excluded).

Compensation & Benefits

• Base pay range: $204,000 — $255,000 USD.
• This role may also be eligible for bonus, equity, benefits, and Employee Travel Credits. Base pay depends on factors such as training, transferable skills, work experience, business needs, and market demands.

Inclusion

• Airbnb is committed to building a diverse workforce and providing a disability-inclusive application and interview process. Candidates who require reasonable accommodations can contact [email protected] with their full name, the role, and the accommodation needed.