# Staff Backend Engineer, Host Serving and Access

**Company:** [Airbnb](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/airbnb)
**Location:** Remote
**Role:** ML Engineering
**Salary:** $212k – $265k/yr
**Experience:** 9+ years
**Skills:** Backend Systems, service-oriented architectures, ml model serving, Real-Time Systems, Data Pipelines, APIs, large-scale architectures, technical strategy, mentoring, Cross-Functional Collaboration
**Posted:** 2026-07-21

> Staff Backend Engineer building real-time and offline serving systems for Host pricing, calendar, and metadata at Airbnb. Lead architecture for low-latency ML model predictions, data pipelines, and personalized recommendations while mentoring engineers and setting technical strategy. Requires 9+ years experience and strong backend expertise.

## Job Description

## Responsibilities
- Architect and drive the technical strategy and architecture for our serving ecosystem, ensuring our APIs, services, and data pipelines not only work well now, but are evolving with the business’ needs.
- Lead the development and optimization of real-time serving systems to deliver low-latency, high-throughput APIs for model predictions and personalized recommendations, ensuring reliable and scalable performance in production environments.
- Collaborate with other product engineers and cross-functional partners to develop new Host pricing functionality and surface model recommendations, insights and analytics.
- Contribute to the development of long-term workflow strategies, roadmaps and ML serving development within the Host Pricing organization.
- Champion engineering excellence by establishing architectural standards and mentoring senior engineers to elevate the organization's technical maturity.

## Requirements
- 9+ years of engineering experience with a BS/MS or PhD in CS or similar.
- Proven track record of leading teams, setting technical strategy, and launching high-impact models.
- Expertise with backend systems in large-scale service-oriented architectures.
- Experience influencing cross-functional partners and engineering teams.
- Good judgment in making tradeoffs to balance short-term business needs with long-term technical quality.
- Excellent communication and cross-team collaboration skills.
- Strong problem-solving and production debugging abilities.

## Nice-to-Haves
- Experience with ML model serving, real-time systems, data pipelines, and personalized recommendation systems.

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