Senior Software Engineer, Dev Tools

The Difference You Will Make

As a senior engineer on Dev Tools, you will design, build, and operate foundational systems used across Airbnb engineering. You will work on technically challenging infrastructure problems involving distributed systems, Kubernetes, developer workflows, scalability, reliability, and cost efficiency, while partnering closely with teams across Developer Platform, DevAI, CI/CD, Cloud Infrastructure, and Security. You won't just build - you'll shape the technical direction and set the bar for craft on a small, high-impact team.

High leverage: Every improvement you make is felt by every engineer at Airbnb — plus the AI agents running on behalf of those engineers. Greenfield platform work: The async agent execution platform is nascent. You'll be making foundational decisions about how it scales, not inheriting someone else's choices. Clear business stakes: Our cloud workspace costs nearly doubled in Q1 as agentic usage surged. The tradeoff between developer productivity and infrastructure spend is real, visible, and yours to influence. Small team, big scope: This is not a large-org role where your contribution gets diffused. The team is intentionally lean - your work ships and your decisions matter.

A Typical Day

• Build and operate cloud development environments and execution platforms for engineers and AI agents.
• Scale Kubernetes-based worker pools, control planes, and APIs for parallel and asynchronous workloads.
• Improve AirDev validation so engineers and agents can test changes quickly before CI.
• Strengthen source-control and code-review systems as PR volume, automation, and concurrency grow.
• Improve developer workflows across build, test, dependency management, and polyglot monorepo tooling.
• Diagnose production issues across distributed systems, networking, storage, and orchestration.
• Setting technical direction and making high-stakes architectural decisions with significant ambiguity.
• Mentoring engineers on the team and raising the quality bar through code review and design feedback.

Your Expertise

• 5-9+ years of industry experience (and/or relevant academic experience).
• Bachelor’s and/or Master’s degree, preferably in CS, or equivalent experience.
• Experience leading and shipping large scope technical projects in collaboration with multiple experienced engineers.
• You are a full-cycle developer: strong ownership and experience building and operating high-scale, distributed systems across the full software life cycle.
• Familiarity with container and orchestration technologies such as Docker and Kubernetes.
• You have excellent communication skills - you can explain complex infrastructure tradeoffs to engineers at all levels and drive cross-team alignment without formal authority.
• You are a strong problem solver and have solid debugging skills.
• You are passionate about developer productivity and making developer lives better.
• Cloud infrastructure and Kubernetes: You've built systems that run reliably at scale on AWS. You know EKS, EC2, EBS, and cloud networking (VPCs, load balancers, VPN tunneling) and have opinions on when each approach is right.
• Platform thinking: You've built infrastructure that other teams build products on top of. You understand the difference between a working prototype and a platform - reliability, observability, clear contracts, and graceful failure modes.
• Cost and efficiency: You treat infrastructure spending as a first-class concern. You've driven meaningful cost reduction through architectural changes, not just right-sizing.
• Agent or async workloads (a plus): You've thought about the operational characteristics of async, autonomous, or long-running compute workloads - pooling, lifecycle management, isolation, secret handling.
• Developer tooling (a plus): You care about the end-to-end developer experience. You've built or contributed to tools that engineers use daily and understand the difference between technically correct and genuinely usable.
• Go, Python, or similar server-side languages. We're pragmatic about language - you'll learn what you need.

Preferred Qualifications

Experience in one or more of the following areas is especially valuable:

• Developer environments, remote development platforms, or sandboxed workload execution.
• Infrastructure for AI agents or asynchronous compute workloads.
• CI/CD, integration testing, build systems, or pre-submit validation.
• Git, GitHub Enterprise, source-control infrastructure, or large-scale repository hosting.
• Code-review systems, policy enforcement, code ownership, or automated review tooling.
• Kubernetes operators, workload scheduling, autoscaling, resource isolation, or capacity management.
• Bazel, monorepo tooling, dependency management, or polyglot build infrastructure.
• Platform APIs, control planes, worker pools, caching systems, or distributed queues.
• Authentication, authorization, secrets management, or secure workload execution.
• Infrastructure cost optimization and capacity planning.