Senior Software Engineer, App Foundation (backend)

Airbnb Airbnb · Consumer · United States · Software Engineering

Senior Software Engineer role focused on building and scaling backend capabilities for Airbnb's App Foundation team. The role involves improving app responsiveness, scale, and reliability, driving a performance roadmap, and influencing architecture and standards across the backend ecosystem. It requires expertise in backend languages, distributed systems, databases, and cloud technologies, with a focus on end-to-end ownership and data-driven decisions.

What you'd actually do

  1. Explore, shape, and develop new product experiences alongside cross-functional partners (design and product); from ideation to implementation at scale
  2. Build efficient and reusable backend capabilities, with high quality, while making sure to maintain performance and scalable systems.
  3. Lead initiatives that measurably improve Guest and Host experience by improving app responsiveness, scale efficiently and reliability across key backend paths that impact millions.
  4. Drive a performance roadmap: identifying bottlenecks, prioritizing work by impact, and delivering improvements across services, data access patterns, and infrastructure.
  5. Raise the bar on performance engineering by building tooling, benchmarks, and guardrails that prevent regressions and make performance a first-class part of how teams ship.

Skills

Required

  • 5+ years of software development experience
  • Strong expertise in one or more back-end server languages (Java/Kotlin/C++/etc.)
  • Experience in building and scaling high-quality and high-traffic products (or systems) in a distributed manner.
  • Deep backend expertise, including proficiency with databases, cloud technologies, and asynchronous messaging systems.
  • End-to-end ownership mentality
  • Rigorous attention to detail
  • ability to tackle ambiguous problems

Nice to have

  • Passion for building strong collaborative relationships with other engineering & product partners
  • Want to tackle projects with large open-ended scope and drive significant business impact
  • Able to self-serve on data analysis and make data driven decisions
  • Embrace the ever changing culture, prioritize breadth over then in-depth but can still go in-depth when needed.

What the JD emphasized

  • high quality
  • performance
  • scalable systems
  • performance roadmap
  • performance engineering
  • performance metrics
  • performance issues
  • performance lens