Staff Software Engineer, Service Tools

Responsibilities

• Own multi-quarter, platform-spanning workstreams across Airbnb’s developer lifecycle, including agentic developer workflows, build infrastructure, testing, codebase modernization, and developer observability.
• Advance AI-assisted development through agent skills, tool integrations, evaluation harnesses, and telemetry.
• Scale build and merge infrastructure for a large JVM monorepo, including remote build execution and caching, merge queues, test sharding and selection, and capacity modeling.
• Improve testing coverage, mutation signal, AI-authored tests, local and pre-merge feedback, and testing standards.
• Lead automated codebase modernization, including JDK and Kotlin toolchain upgrades, test-framework migrations, and build-module migrations.
• Use developer and production telemetry to guide priorities and improve developer experience, velocity, debuggability, resilience, reliability, and cost.
• Set technical standards through code and architecture reviews, design documents, incident reviews, and postmortems.
• Mentor engineers and partner with engineering leaders across Airbnb to drive adoption of new capabilities.
• Represent the work through technical writing, conference talks, open source, and vendor partnerships.

Requirements

• 9+ years of industry experience with a bachelor’s or master’s degree, or 6+ years with a PhD.
• Bachelor’s and/or master’s degree, preferably in computer science, or equivalent experience.
• Proficiency in one or more backend server languages, such as Java, Kotlin, Ruby, Go, or C++.
• Experience with high-scale distributed systems, including APIs, data pipelines, and efficient algorithms.
• Experience owning platform or infrastructure areas end to end and driving multi-quarter technical agendas.
• Deep experience with build systems and large monorepos.
• Extensive JVM experience, including build and test performance, memory, and startup behavior.
• Ability to influence stakeholders and align teams outside the direct reporting line.
• Experience collaborating cross-functionally with design, product, and data science teams.
• Strong measurement, technical writing, architecture, mentoring, and operational-excellence skills.

Nice to Have

• Bazel and remote build execution experience.
• Experience with coding agents, context engineering, tool integrations, and rigorous agent evaluation.
• Experience with automated refactoring and large-scale developer productivity initiatives.

Compensation and Benefits

• Base pay range: $212,000–$265,000 USD.
• May also be eligible for bonus, equity, benefits, and Employee Travel Credits.