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Salary: USD 212,000 - 265,000 / annual
Airbnb's Service Tools team enables backend developers to develop, test, and maintain code quickly and reliably. The team owns the standard development lifecycle for service owners—from AI-assisted development through build systems, integration testing, code review, and deployment. This role represents an opportunity to shape the technical direction for Airbnb's largest cohort of developers.
As a Staff Engineer, you will set technical direction rather than only deliver against it. You will own a platform-spanning area of the developer lifecycle end to end, framing problems, building measurement systems that prove impact matters, driving roadmaps with partner teams, and growing the engineers who build with you. The next 18–24 months of this platform are genuinely open: agentic development is changing what the inner loop looks like, and this role offers the opportunity to help decide what it should become.
Key responsibilities include:
- Owning multi-quarter, platform-spanning workstreams as the DRI (agentic developer workflows, intelligent build infrastructure, test excellence, codebase modernization, or developer observability)
- Advancing the AI-assisted development platform: agent skills and tool integrations, evaluation harnesses, and telemetry showing where human intervention is still needed
- 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 capacity modeling
- Raising the floor on testing through coverage and mutation signal, AI-authored tests, faster local and pre-merge feedback, and testing contracts
- Leading large-scale codebase modernization (JDK and Kotlin toolchain upgrades, test-framework migrations, build-module migrations) through automated refactoring
- Turning developer and production telemetry into decisions—quantifying where time, spend, and confidence are lost and using that to change priorities
- Setting standards by example: code and architecture reviews, design docs, incident reviews and postmortems, and anticipating reliability problems
- Helping shape technical strategy that moves 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
- Partnering with engineering leaders across Airbnb to drive adoption of new capabilities
- Representing the work outside Airbnb: 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.)
- Experience with 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
- Experience or desire to work collaboratively in cross-functional teams with design, product, and data science partners
- Track record of owning platform or infrastructure areas end to end—setting a technical agenda, aligning partner teams, and delivering over multiple quarters
- Deep hands-on experience with build systems and large monorepos; Bazel and remote build execution experience is a strong plus
- Extensive JVM experience (Java and/or Kotlin), including 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 rigorous agent quality evaluation
- Strong measurement instinct: reaching for data to size problems and prove fixes work; skepticism of metrics that flatter the team
- Comfort tackling projects with large, open-ended, ambiguous scope and deciding what should exist rather than waiting for a spec
- Ability to raise the level of engineers around you through code reviews, architecture discussions, mentorship, and clear writing
- Treating operational excellence and technical debt as first-class roadmap items
- Motivation to improve teammates' productivity and join an impactful infrastructure team
