Staff Software Engineer, Service Tools

Airbnb

Location: US
Workplace: Remote
Employment: Full Time
Salary: USD 212,000–265,000/yr

Posted 24d ago

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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
Representing the work outside Airbnb where it helps: tech blog posts, conference talks, open source, and vendor partnerships

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
Deep hands-on experience with build systems and large monorepos
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
A measurement instinct: you reach for data to size a problem and to prove the fix worked
Want to tackle projects with large, open-ended, ambiguous scope
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
Are excited to join an impactful infrastructure team and are motivated to improve your teammates' productivity

Preferred

Bazel and remote build execution experience is a strong plus
Experience or desire to work collaboratively in cross-functional teams with design, product and data science partners

Skills

Java
Kotlin
Ruby
Go
C++
Bazel
JVM
AI
coding agents
context engineering
tool integrations
telemetry
data pipelines
APIs
algorithms
architecture
code review
design docs
incident reviews
postmortems
mentorship

Responsibilities

Requirements

Preferred

Skills

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