About the company
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.
Responsibilities
- Owning a multi-quarter, platform-spanning workstream — agentic developer workflows, intelligent build infrastructure, test excellence, codebase modernization, or developer observability — as the DRI other teams come to
- Advancing our AI-assisted development platform: agent skills and tool integrations, the evaluation harnesses that keep them honest, and the telemetry that shows where a human still has to intervene
- Scaling build and merge infrastructure for a very large JVM monorepo: Bazel, remote build execution and caching, merge-queue throughput, test sharding and selection, and the capacity modeling that keeps it all inside budget
- Raising the floor on testing — coverage and mutation signal, AI-authored tests, faster local and pre-merge feedback, and testing contracts teams can hold each other to
- Leading large-scale codebase modernization (JDK and Kotlin toolchain upgrades, test-framework migrations, build-module migrations) through automated refactoring rather than manual toil
- Turning developer and production telemetry into decisions — quantifying where time, spend, and confidence are being lost, and using that to change priorities, including your own team's
- Setting standards by example: code and architecture reviews, design docs, incident reviews and postmortems, and anticipating the reliability problem before it pages anyone
- Helping to shape the technical strategy that directly moves our core metrics (Developer Experience, Developer Velocity, Debuggability, Resilience and Reliability) while reducing cost
- Mentoring and growing engineers on the team in partnership with the engineering manager — multiplying yourself through what you teach, not only what you ship
- Partnering with engineering leaders across every Airbnb org to drive adoption of new capabilities. Your customers are all engineers at Airbnb, and adoption is part of the job
- Representing the work outside Airbnb where it helps: tech blog posts, conference talks, open source, and vendor partnerships
Requirements
- A track record of owning platform or infrastructure areas end to end — you have set a technical agenda, aligned partner teams behind it, and delivered it over multiple quarters
- Deep hands-on experience with build systems and large monorepos; Bazel and remote build execution experience is a strong plus
- Extensive JVM experience (Java and/or Kotlin), including the performance, memory, and startup behavior of large builds and test suites
- Fluency with the modern AI-assisted development stack — coding agents, skills and context engineering, tool integrations, and evaluating agent quality rigorously rather than anecdotally
- A measurement instinct: you reach for data to size a problem and to prove the fix worked, and you are skeptical of metrics that flatter the team
- Want to tackle projects with large, open-ended, ambiguous scope, and are comfortable deciding what should exist rather than waiting for a spec
- Raise the level of the engineers around you through code reviews, architecture discussions, mentorship, and clear writing
- Treat operational excellence and technical debt as first-class roadmap items rather than afterthoughts
- Are excited to join an impactful infrastructure team and are motivated to improve your teammates' productivity
- 9+ years of industry experience with a Bachelor's/Master's degree, or 6+ years with a PhD
- Bachelor's and/or Master's degree, preferably in CS, or equivalent experience
- Proficiency in one or more back-end server languages (Java/Kotlin/Ruby/Go/C++/etc.)
- Experienced in architectural patterns of high-scale distributed products/services, such as well-designed APIs, data pipelines and efficient algorithms
- Demonstrated ability to influence stakeholders and drive alignment across teams and functions outside your own reporting line
- Experience or desire to work collaboratively in cross-functional teams with design, product and data science partners
Conditions
- 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.