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Airbnb's Guest & Host Technology team is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to build and scale backend systems for user identity and privacy. This role focuses on the foundational systems that determine who can see what about whom, in what context, and why—including migrating how the company references users (from raw global identifiers to relationship-scoped identity) and building privacy controls for features like trip sharing and profile visibility.
You will reason about relationship-scoped access control and build systems that dozens of teams across the company depend on. Your work spans true backend fundamentals: service architecture, data modeling, authorization logic, and migration tooling that must run safely at Airbnb's scale without breaking downstream consumers.
Key responsibilities include:
- Design and build backend services and APIs that enforce identity and privacy rules consistently across product surfaces
- Contribute to large-scale migrations (e.g., moving service and client code off legacy identity patterns), including the tooling that makes those migrations safe to run broadly
- Define and evolve authorization logic for context-scoped data access, reasoning clearly about edge cases
- Partner with teams building on top of your systems (messaging, trips, profile, etc.) to ensure privacy primitives are usable and hard to misuse
- Participate in design and code reviews, raising the bar for correctness in a critical codebase where mistakes are costly
- Debug and resolve production issues with clear, structured root-cause analysis
Requirements:
- 6+ years of professional backend software engineering experience with strong fundamentals in service-oriented architecture, API design, and data modeling
- Proficiency in Java and/or Kotlin, and comfort working within a microservices environment (RPC frameworks, service IDLs, dependency injection)
- Experience designing systems with correctness and authorization as first-class concerns
- Track record of shipping migrations or infrastructure changes that other teams depend on, with attention to backward compatibility and rollout safety
- Strong written communication; ability to clearly document problems, root causes, and solution trade-offs
- Comfort with ambiguity; ability to take complex, evolving privacy or identity requirements and turn them into concrete technical designs
