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AirbnbAirbnbUnited States

Principal Software Engineer, Performance

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

Skills

KubernetesDockerAWSGCPAzureProfilingInstrumentationDistributed TracingSLOsJvmKernel
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