Staff Software Engineer, Technical Lead - KV Stores & Caching

Details

Airbnb was born in 2007 when two hosts welcomed three guests to their San Francisco home, and has since grown to over 5 million hosts who have welcomed over 2 billion guest arrivals in almost every country across the globe. Every day, hosts offer unique stays and experiences that make it possible for guests to connect with communities in a more authentic way.

The Community You Will Join

The KV Stores & Caching team within Airbnb's Online Data org owns and operates critical pieces of Airbnb's online serving storage systems. Specifically, the team owns and is responsible for:

• A highly available, low-latency, distributed, multi-tenant KV store for Airbnb. This platform is used by user profiling, Search, ML, and pricing teams, supporting millions of read QPS and providing 99.9+% availability across thousands of customer tables.
• A set of control planes and clients that manage ElasticCache clusters for hundreds of Airbnb production clusters, at million+ IOPS and million+ indexing QPS.
• A scalable, reliable, performant distributed coordination service supporting many mission-critical systems (MySQL, Redis, Kafka, Flink, Druid, Zookeeper, etc).

The Difference You Will Make

As Technical Lead, you will drive the technical vision and execution for our KV stores and caching infrastructure. You will mentor engineers, shape architectural decisions, and ensure the team delivers high-impact solutions. Examples of the types of challenges you will lead include:

• Defining the multi-year technical roadmap for caching and KV infrastructure at Airbnb
• Evolving our KV store from derived-data workloads to support system-of-record use cases, expanding the platform's capabilities and customer base
• Building a multi-tenant caching solution for Airbnb
• Guiding the rearchitecture of our KV write path to remove infrastructure complexity while improving replication lag
• Overseeing frameworks for high-traffic, zero-downtime migrations between critical data platforms

Requirements / Your Expertise

• 10+ years of relevant industry experience
• Proven track record of leading and mentoring engineering teams, setting technical direction, and growing engineers in their careers
• Deep expertise in distributed systems, multi-tenant storage, and infrastructure
• Experience architecting and scaling high-performance, business-critical systems
• Demonstrated ability to collaborate and influence across teams and organizations, building alignment on technical strategy
• Strong judgment on technical trade-offs and ability to drive decisions that balance short-term delivery with long-term maintainability
• Experience onboarding to and navigating a broad and complex codebase, and enabling others to do the same

Location

This position is US - Remote Eligible. The role may include occasional work at an Airbnb office or attendance at offsites, as agreed to with your manager. While the position is Remote Eligible, you must live in a state where Airbnb, Inc. has a registered entity. (Refer to Airbnb careers page for the up-to-date list of excluded states.)

How We'll Take Care of You

Our job titles may span more than one career level. The actual base pay is dependent upon many factors, such as: training, transferable skills, work experience, business needs and market demands. The base pay range is subject to change and may be modified in the future. This role may also be eligible for bonus, equity, benefits, and Employee Travel Credits.

Pay Range

$204,000—$255,000 USD