Staff Software Engineer, Service Tools

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: Airbnb is a mission-driven company dedicated to helping create a world where anyone can belong anywhere. It takes a unified team committed to our core values to achieve this goal. Airbnb's various functions embody the company's innovative spirit and our fast-moving team is committed to leading as a 21st century company. The Difference You Will Make: The Service Tools team's mission is to enable Airbnb backend developers to develop, test, and maintain their code quickly and reliably. We own the standard development lifecycle for service owners — from AI-assisted development, through the build system, integration testing and code review, to how services get built for deployment. This represents Airbnb's largest cohort of developers, and you will ultimately be responsible for their productivity. As a Staff Engineer, you will set technical direction rather than only deliver against it. You will own a platform-spanning area of the developer lifecycle end to end — framing the problem, building the measurement that proves it matters, driving a roadmap with partner teams across the company, and growing the engineers who build it with you. The next 18–24 months of this platform are genuinely open: agentic development is changing what the inner loop looks like, and we want someone who wants to help decide what it should become. A Typical Day: 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 Your Expertise: 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 Minimum Requirements: 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 Your 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. Click here for the up-to-date list of excluded states. This list is continuously evolving, so please check back with us if the state you live in is on the exclusion list. If your position is employed by another Airbnb entity, your recruiter will inform you what states you are eligible to work from. 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: reasonableaccommodations@airbnb.com . 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. Pay Range $212,000 — $265,000 USD