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Salary: GBP 120,000 - 150,000 / annual
Airbnb is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to join its Hosting Services engineering team in London. This is a hands-on technical leadership role focused on building new products and services that make hosting on Airbnb easier and more rewarding.
You will shape the technical direction and architecture of Airbnb's expanding ecosystem of Host services, working across backend systems, APIs, frontend, mobile and distributed architecture. This role combines deep technical expertise with product thinking and strategic partnership across engineering, product, design and business teams.
Key responsibilities include:
- Leading the technical design and development of new customer-facing products, services and third-party integrations from zero to one
- Defining the future state of major systems and services, designing flexible, reliable and scalable solutions
- Identifying new approaches, reusable patterns, tooling and AI-enabled development opportunities to accelerate engineering innovation
- Partnering with product and design teams through discovery, ideation, development, launch and iteration to ensure solutions deliver measurable value
- Applying expertise across the full technology stack, remaining hands-on where needed to solve complex engineering challenges
- Guiding engineers across teams in making sound architectural decisions and maintaining high standards of reliability, performance and user experience
- Collaborating with engineering, product, UX, data science and business stakeholders to align technical decisions with broader objectives
- Challenging existing approaches and identifying opportunities to build better products and move faster
You will work closely with colleagues in the US and have the autonomy to influence strategy and create meaningful impact on Airbnb's next generation of hosting services.
Requirements:
- 9+ years of software engineering experience in fast-paced, product-led technology environments with a track record of delivering complex, high-impact solutions
- Strong backend engineering expertise, including designing and developing large-scale, service-oriented and distributed systems
- Proven experience building customer-facing products from zero to one, contributing to product definition, technical architecture, development and launch
- End-to-end product ownership experience, with ability to iterate on launched products, respond to customer feedback and improve adoption and business outcomes
- Broad full-stack engineering capability with confidence to work across backend, frontend, mobile, APIs and system architecture
- Strong architectural design skills, including high-scale distributed services, well-designed APIs, data pipelines, efficient algorithms and reliable integrations
- Sound technical judgment to balance speed of delivery, experimentation, scalability and long-term engineering quality
- Product-first engineering mindset with understanding that technical decisions should drive customer and business value
