Senior Software Engineer, Storage

Airbnb's Online Data organization gives every engineer at Airbnb the power to build real-time data experiences — through simple, intuitive tools, without needing deep database expertise.

Within Online Data, the Storage Foundation team owns the online serving stores and databases that power Airbnb. We build and operate Airbnb's source-of-truth database: an open-source, distributed NewSQL system running on stateful Kubernetes. It stores critical data — users, listings, and more — and handles over half of all of Airbnb's online OLTP traffic. Our charter: keep this database reliable, secure, scalable, fast, correct, well-tested, and cost-efficient — at Airbnb's scale.

The Community You Will Join

We're hiring two roles within the Database team. Both are described below.

• Database Performance & Reliability: Dig into the internals of a large-scale, multi-tenant, distributed database — storage, query execution, consensus, change data capture, and shard routing and management. You'll root-cause hard performance, reliability, and stability issues, and partner directly with our open-source database vendor to land fixes upstream.
• Database Quality & Automation: Build the testing and quality infrastructure that lets us move fast with confidence on an open-source database. You'll bring tools like Jepsen and other database benchmarks into Airbnb's in-house testing stack, drive CI integration with OSS test suites, and design creative solutions for database tiering and representative load shadowing. As AI accelerates development speed and our availability bar climbs toward 99.99%, this role becomes only more critical to how fast and safely we can ship.

Examples of the Difference You'll Make

• Build the frameworks and tooling around monitoring, observability, permissions, and service discovery integration.
• 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, CPU prioritization, and reason about traffic
• Test, validate and safely roll out a new CDC architecture while guaranteeing full transactional correctness across shards.

Your Expertise

• 5+ years building and operating large-scale, Tier 0 distributed systems.
• Hands-on experience with database or storage internals: query execution, storage engines, replication, consensus and testing.
• Ability to own and dive deeply into a complex codebase, ideally an open-source one.
• Experience developing code, maintaining, analyzing, and debugging high-severity production incidents, leveraging AI agents.
• 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.

Equal Employment Opportunity:

Airbnb values diversity & belonging and is proud to be an Equal Employment Opportunity employer. All individuals seeking employment at Airbnb are considered without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, age, gender, sex, marital status, ancestry, physical or mental disability, veteran status, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, or any other legally protected characteristic.