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Salary: USD 196,000 - 230,000 / annual
Airbnb's Service Mesh team, part of Network Platform, is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to work on infrastructure that powers secure, reliable, and observable service-to-service communication across the platform. You will design, build, and operate critical systems connecting all Airbnb backend services, covering service discovery, load balancing, access control, traffic failover, and routing for thousands of applications.
In this role, you will define and deliver the roadmap for mesh capabilities including routing, security, policy, resilience, and multi-region failover. You'll set and track SLOs/SLAs for availability and performance, driving data-informed improvements. You will build and mentor a strong engineering team while establishing engineering excellence, code health, and operational rigor. Collaboration is key—you'll align with Security, Edge/Traffic, Compute, and Developer Platform teams on cross-cutting initiatives and standards.
You'll mature incident management practices, post-incident learning, change management, and safe rollout procedures. You'll also plan capacity and investments to meet growth while optimizing efficiency and cost.
Airbnb is a member of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) end-user community and works closely with the open source community (Kubernetes, Istio) and peer companies. You'll have the opportunity to make an impact on industry and open source communities while working on cutting-edge cloud-native network stack technologies.
The team culture emphasizes getting things done while being supportive, honest, and having fun. You'll work with talented engineers on high-impact infrastructure initiatives such as global traffic load balancing, disaster recovery, next-gen service mesh, cross-region gateways, and edge security.
**Requirements:**
- 5+ years of relevant software development experience in a fast-paced, high-growth tech environment
- Experience running large-scale networking systems and software (e.g., edge proxies, DNS, CDN, network gateways); experience with Istio and Envoy is a plus
- Full-cycle developer with strong ownership and experience building and operating high-scale, distributed systems across the full software lifecycle
- Excellent communication skills and ability to work well within teams and across engineering organizations
- Strong problem-solving skills and experience leading a team that is on-call for production infrastructure
- Passion for efficiency, availability, technical quality, and system quality
