Staff Software Engineer, Tech Foundations

Details

The Observability team builds the platform Airbnb engineers use to understand how their systems behave in production. The platform collects, processes, stores, and queries metrics, logs, events, and traces from backend services and client applications. The metrics platform ingests tens of millions of samples per second across more than a billion active time series, serving both engineers and AI agents.

Responsibilities

• Set the technical direction for a major area of the Observability platform and lead it from design through production.
• Scale the metrics pipeline using OpenTelemetry, vmagent, and Grafana Mimir while controlling costs through aggregation, sampling, and blocking unused metrics.
• Replace legacy log aggregation with an OpenTelemetry-based pipeline and evolve log and trace storage on OpenSearch.
• Build a fast, reliable query layer for engineers and AI agents, including rate limiting, access control, isolation, and caching.
• Provide teams with self-service visibility and control over telemetry costs, including unit cost per team and service and controls for granularity, sampling, and retention.
• Improve time to detect through anomaly detection and automated correlation across signals.
• Lead the design and delivery of distributed systems handling tens of millions of events per second, from prototype through production operation.
• Write well-crafted, well-tested, readable, and maintainable code, and contribute to relevant open-source projects.
• Align roadmaps across Observability, infrastructure, and product teams, and drive build, buy, and open-source decisions.
• Explain technical tradeoffs and return on investment to engineering leadership in terms of reliability, cost, and developer productivity.
• Mentor engineers and raise standards for design reviews, operational readiness, and on-call practices.
• Help Airbnb engineers instrument their services and self-serve when debugging production issues.

Requirements

• 9+ years of industry experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems in production.
• Experience leading the technical direction of a system or multi-team project end to end, including design, stakeholder alignment, delivery, and operations.
• Deep experience in at least one telemetry domain at scale: metrics such as Prometheus, Grafana Mimir, or VictoriaMetrics; logs such as OpenSearch or Kafka; or distributed tracing such as OpenTelemetry, Jaeger, or ClickHouse.
• Strong coding skills in Go or Java/Kotlin, with the ability to work in unfamiliar codebases and upstream open-source projects.
• Experience with cloud-native infrastructure, including Kubernetes, AWS, and service mesh technologies such as Istio and Envoy.
• Clear written and verbal communication skills, including experience with design documents and tradeoff analysis for engineering leadership.

Nice to Have

• Contributions to OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana Mimir, VictoriaMetrics, OpenSearch, Jaeger, or similar projects.
• Experience with time-series storage internals, high-cardinality data, or query performance.
• Experience with anomaly detection, automated correlation, or SLO-based alerting.
• Experience with telemetry cost attribution or cost optimization at scale.
• Experience building APIs or tools for AI agents that consume operational data, such as MCP servers.
• Experience with columnar analytics stores such as ClickHouse.

Location

This position is US remote eligible. The role may include occasional work at an Airbnb office or attendance at offsites, as agreed with the manager. Candidates must live in a state where Airbnb, Inc. has a registered entity.

Compensation

The base pay range is $212,000–$265,000 USD per year. The role may also be eligible for bonus, equity, benefits, and Employee Travel Credits.

Inclusion and Accommodations

Airbnb is committed to inclusion and belonging, equal employment opportunity, and providing a disability-inclusive application and interview process. Reasonable accommodations are available throughout the recruitment process.