Senior Software Engineer, App Foundation (Backend)

Airbnb was born in 2007 when two hosts welcomed three guests to their San Francisco home, and has since grown to over 5 million hosts who have welcomed over 2 billion guest arrivals in almost every country across the globe. Every day, hosts offer unique stays and experiences that make it possible for guests to connect with communities in a more authentic way. The Community You Will Join: You’ll join Airbnb’s App Foundation team, a cross-platform team that builds high quality and performant capabilities that power almost all features in the Guest and Host ecosystem. We focus on building App Product Frameworks, Insights Logging, Performance App Health, and Feature Architecture, partnering closely with Product, Design, Platform (iOS/Android/Web), Analytics Infrastructure, Data Platform, and peer Product Foundation teams to provide cohesive paved paths and standards at scale. Our culture values technical excellence, pragmatic decision-making, strong ownership, and a deep commitment to improving developer and user experience through foundational work. The Difference You Will Make: Explore, shape, and develop new product experiences alongside cross-functional partners (design and product); from ideation to implementation at scale Build efficient and reusable backend capabilities, with high quality, while making sure to maintain performance and scalable systems. Lead initiatives that measurably improve Guest and Host experience by improving app responsiveness, scale efficiently and reliability across key backend paths that impact millions. Drive a performance roadmap: identifying bottlenecks, prioritizing work by impact, and delivering improvements across services, data access patterns, and infrastructure. Raise the bar on performance engineering by building tooling, benchmarks, and guardrails that prevent regressions and make performance a first-class part of how teams ship. Influence architecture and standards across Airbnb’s backend ecosystem, making systems more observable, more efficient, and easier to evolve. A Typical Day: Millions of users across the world engage with the Airbnb app in multiple languages every day. As an engineer on the App Foundation team, you would be critical to the continued success and broad appeal of Airbnb. In this role, you will have an opportunity to: Work collaboratively in cross-functional teams with design, product and data science partners, to define and ship impactful features. Propose architectural patterns of a high-scale applications, such as well-designed APIs, data pipelines and efficient algorithms Writing unit and integration tests, reviewing other’s code Review service-level performance metrics and triage anomalies or regressions. Profile and debug performance issues across service boundaries and implement fixes (e.g., query optimization, caching strategies, concurrency improvements, payload reduction). Partner with engineers across teams to improve critical request flows - aligning on SLOs, rollout plans, and measurement strategies. Participate in code reviews and architecture discussions with a performance lens, helping teams ship changes safely and efficiently Document learnings and create playbooks so performance improvements scale beyond a single service or team. Your Expertise: 5+ years of software development experience Strong expertise in one or more back-end server languages (Java/Kotlin/C++/etc.) Experience in building and scaling high-quality and high-traffic products (or systems) in a distributed manner. Deep backend expertise, including proficiency with databases, cloud technologies, and asynchronous messaging systems. End-to-end ownership mentality that transcends team boundaries. Passion for building strong collaborative relationships with other engineering product partners Want to tackle projects with large open-ended scope and drive significant business impact Able to self-serve on data analysis and make data driven decisions Rigorous attent ... (truncated, view full listing at source)