Leads Airbnb's performance engineering strategy across full stack including CPU/GPU utilization, backend efficiency, and ML infra. Builds profiling tools, influences company-wide SLOs, and mentors engineers with 12+ years experience in high-scale systems.
292k – 365k
Remote12+ YOEBackend Engineering
About the role
Responsibilities
Define and drive Airbnb's long-term performance strategy, spanning product performance, infrastructure efficiency, and business objectives for scale and growth
Lead the architecture and development of performance profiling and instrumentation infrastructure, covering CPU, GPU, memory, request hot paths, utilization, and deployment events, making these capabilities available to all backend teams
Partner with infrastructure teams across compute, reliability, backend frameworks, and AI Infra to ensure the fleet operates at optimal utilization
Connect performance outcomes to business objectives and company-wide SLOs, and guide engineering teams in keeping the stack scalable and efficient
Evaluate emerging hardware and software technologies, engage with the external solutions ecosystem, and advise on build vs. buy decisions in areas of strategic importance
Mentor and technically uplevel engineers across the organization through design reviews, architectural guidance, and performance best practices
Requirements
12+ years of performance engineering experience in high-scale, high-growth production environments
Deep understanding of how software and hardware systems interact at scale, including architectural patterns for performance-critical stacks
Strong familiarity with public cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and container orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes)
Experience with profiling and instrumentation tooling across CPU, GPU, memory, and distributed request tracing
Demonstrated ability to define performance objectives and drive delivery against company-wide SLOs across multiple organizations
Strong communication and influence skills; comfortable driving technical direction with senior engineering and product leadership
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