About this Senior Software Engineer, Storage role at Airbnb
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 Online Data organization empowers Airbnb's builders to create real-time data experiences through intuitive data interfaces and tools — no database expertise required. Within Online Data, the Transactional Storage Services team owns all of Airbnb's online serving stores and databases.
We design, build, and operate a new source-of-truth, open-source NewSQL database running on stateful Kubernetes. It hosts Airbnb's critical user, listing, and financial data, along with the essential database capabilities that support it: backup and restore, change data capture (CDC), and multi-tenancy.
The Community You Will Join
We're hiring across two teams within Transactional Storage Services. Both are described below.
- Database Kernel: The Kernel team owns performance, reliability, and stability for Airbnb's NewSQL engine at scale, spanning storage, query execution, consensus, CDC, and central routing and shard management. In this role you'll do deep technical investigation of database internals and SQL latency and availability issues, and partner closely with our open-source database vendor on root cause analysis and upstream contributions.
- Database Adoption: The Adoption team builds the infrastructure that moves Airbnb's data workloads onto NewSQL: eventually consistent two-way replication between databases, fully automated failover and failback, and a migration operator. In this role you'll work across Kernel, SRE, and the ORM, KV, and SQL interface teams to make onboarding and migration smooth for internal customers.
Examples of the Difference You'll Make
- Dig into the query and storage layers to explain latency differences between B-tree and LSM-based storage engines.
- Design and implement traffic prioritization at the storage layer for connection pooling.
- Validate and safely roll out a new CDC architecture while guaranteeing full transactional correctness across shards.
- Build the frameworks and tooling around our NewSQL database — monitoring, observability, permissions, and service discovery integration.
Your Expertise
- 5+ years building and operating large-scale distributed systems — storage, data ingestion, backup and restore, or streaming.
- Hands-on experience with database or storage internals: query execution, storage engines, replication, or consensus.
- Ability to own and dive deeply into a complex codebase, ideally an open-source one.
- Experience maintaining, analyzing, and debugging high-severity production incidents.
- Writes clean, testable, maintainable code.
- Strong collaboration and communication skills in a remote working environment.
- Strong ownership and a consistent track record of delivery.
Our Commitment To Inclusion & Belonging:
Airbnb is committed to working with the broadest talent pool possible. We believe diverse ideas foster innovation and engagement, and allow us to attract creatively-led people, and to develop the best products, services and solutions. All qualified individuals are encouraged to apply.
We strive to also provide a disability inclusive application and interview process. If you are a candidate with a disability and require reasonable accommodation in order to submit an application, please contact us at: [email protected]. Please include your full name, the role you’re applying for and the accommodation necessary to assist you with the recruiting process.
We ask that you only reach out to us if you are a candidate whose disability prevents you from being able to complete our online application.
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.
Reasonable Accommodations: We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations throughout the recruitment process for applicants with disabilities. If you need assistance, or an accommodation, please let your recruiter know once you are contacted about a role.
A Note on Recruiting Scams: Scammers sometimes pose as Airbnb recruiters to get money or personal information from candidates. A few things that will always be true for Airbnb’s hiring process: our open roles are posted on Airbnb’s Career’s Page at careers.airbnb.com, and our recruiters correspond only from @airbnb.com or @ext.airbnb.com email addresses. Our recruiters will never ask for your Social Security number, bank account details, passport, or payment app information while you are interviewing. We’ll also never ask you to pay a fee, send money, deposit or cash a check, or purchase work-related equipment (such as a company laptop) during the interview process. We encourage candidates to remain vigilant of these recruiting scams and not share sensitive information if you do not believe an individual is actually affiliated with Airbnb.
