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Salary: USD 196,000 - 230,000 / annual
Airbnb's Online Data organization is hiring a Senior Software Engineer to join the Transactional Storage Services team, which owns all of Airbnb's online serving stores and databases. The team designs, builds, and operates a new source-of-truth, open-source NewSQL database running on stateful Kubernetes, hosting Airbnb's critical user, listing, and financial data along with essential capabilities like backup/restore, change data capture (CDC), and multi-tenancy.
You will join one of two specialized teams:
**Database Kernel Team**: Owns performance, reliability, and stability for Airbnb's NewSQL engine at scale, spanning storage, query execution, consensus, CDC, and central routing/shard management. You'll conduct deep technical investigation of database internals and SQL latency/availability issues, and partner closely with the open-source database vendor on root cause analysis and upstream contributions.
**Database Adoption Team**: Builds infrastructure to migrate Airbnb's data workloads onto NewSQL, including eventually consistent two-way replication, fully automated failover/failback, and migration operators. You'll work across Kernel, SRE, and ORM/KV/SQL interface teams to streamline onboarding and migration for internal customers.
**Example Projects**:
- Analyze 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
- Validate and safely roll out new CDC architecture while guaranteeing transactional correctness across shards
- Build frameworks and tooling around the NewSQL database (monitoring, observability, permissions, service discovery)
This role offers the opportunity to work on critical infrastructure at massive scale, directly impacting how Airbnb serves billions of guest arrivals globally.
**Requirements**:
- 5+ years building and operating large-scale distributed systems (storage, data ingestion, backup/restore, or streaming)
- Hands-on experience with database or storage internals: query execution, storage engines, replication, or consensus
- Ability to own and dive deeply into complex codebases, ideally open-source
- Experience maintaining, analyzing, and debugging high-severity production incidents
- Writes clean, testable, maintainable code
- Strong collaboration and communication skills in a remote working environment
- Strong ownership and consistent track record of delivery
