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Staff Software Engineer, Streaming Infrastructure

Airbnb· Data Infrastructure
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Hybrid (US - Remote Eligible)$204k - $255kFull-timePosted 6mo ago

About the role

Senior engineer leading the design and delivery of Airbnb’s unified streaming data platform, focusing on control plane, schema management, and realtime data infrastructure (RTDI) for scalable, safe, and cost-efficient data movement and transformation.

Responsibilities

  • Design and evolve the control plane that automatically provisions Kafka topics, registers schemas, and deploys pipelines from a declarative definition.
  • Build schema management that makes evolution safe and backward compatible across streaming, storage, and warehouse systems.
  • Improve the reliability, scalability, and cost efficiency of RTDI and Kafka at Airbnb’s scale, including capacity, multi-tenancy, and failure handling.
  • Replace fragmented pipeline tooling with shared, self-serve platform abstractions that other teams adopt.
  • Lead design reviews and incident follow-through, and raise the engineering and operational bar for the team.

Qualifications

  • 9+ years of software engineering, including significant experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems, ideally data platforms, event-driven systems, or streaming infrastructure.
  • Hands-on experience with Kafka or a similar distributed log or messaging system, with a good understanding of partitioning, delivery semantics, throughput, and operational tradeoffs.
  • Experience designing schema or data contract systems, such as schema registries, serialization formats like Avro or Protobuf, and compatibility and evolution strategies.
  • Experience building control planes or platform APIs, such as declarative configuration, reconciliation, workflow orchestration, or resource provisioning, ideally on Kubernetes.
  • Familiarity with stream processing (e.g., Flink) or change data capture is a plus.
  • A track record of leading ambiguous, multi-quarter projects, taking them from design through delivery in production.
  • Ability to set technical direction, write clear design docs, and align multiple teams, and to mentor and grow other engineers.
  • Experience running large-scale systems in production, including on-call, incident response, and root cause analysis.
  • Writes clean, testable, maintainable code.
  • Strong collaboration and communication skills in a remote working environment.

Skills

Required:Distributed systems designKafka or distributed messagingSchema management / data contractsControl planes / platform APIsLeadership / cross-team influenceProduction on-call / incident responseCoding quality
Nice to have:Streaming / data processing

Benefits

  • Reasonable accommodations available during recruitment and interview process.
Last updated Oct 22, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.
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About Airbnb

Book accommodations around the world.

Founded in August of 2008 and based in San Francisco, California, Airbnb is a trusted community marketplace for people to list, discover, and book unique accommodations around the world — online or from a mobile phone. Whether an apartment for a night, a castle for a week, or a villa for a month, Airbnb connects people to unique travel experiences, at any price point, in more than 33,000 cities and 192 countries. And with world-class customer service and a growing community of users, Airbnb is the easiest way for people to monetize their extra space and showcase it to an audience of millions. No global movement springs from individuals. It takes an entire team united behind something big. Together, we work hard, we laugh a lot, we brainstorm nonstop, we use hundreds of Post-Its a week, and we give the best high-fives in town. Headquartered in San Francisco, we have satellite offices in Dublin, London, Barcelona, Paris, Milan, Copenhagen, Berlin, Moscow, São Paolo, Sydney, and Singapore.

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