Staff Software Engineer (Technical Lead), Storage

Responsibilities

• Lead a team of developers to deliver multi-quarter cross functional projects.
• Stay up-to-date with the latest developments in data ingestion systems and evaluate and incorporate new technologies and methodologies to improve the existing data ingestion architecture/solution.
• Influence the team’s and organization’s long-term roadmap and strategy.
• Mentor and coach team members, providing guidance and support to enhance their skills and technical standards in the team.
• Raise operational standards by effectively and proactively identifying, debugging and fixing operational issues. Be part of the oncall rotation for the Ingestion team.

The KV Stores & Caching team owns and operates:

• A highly available, low-latency, distributed, multi-tenant KV store used by user profiling, Search, ML, and pricing teams.
• Control planes and clients that manage ElasticCache clusters.
• A scalable, reliable, performant distributed coordination service supporting mission-critical systems (MySQL, Redis, Kafka, Flink, Druid, Zookeeper, etc).

The Ingestion team provides a managed, reliable, performant and scalable platform for exporting data out of Airbnb’s online databases for asynchronous processing (CDC and periodic snapshots).

Requirements

• 9+ years of relevant industry experience.
• Proven track record of leading and mentoring engineering teams, setting technical direction, and growing engineers in their careers.
• Deep expertise in distributed systems, multi-tenant storage, and infrastructure. You've architected and scaled high-performance, business-critical systems.
• Demonstrated ability to collaborate and influence across teams and organizations, building alignment on technical strategy.
• Strong judgment on technical trade-offs and ability to drive decisions that balance short-term delivery with long-term maintainability.
• Experience onboarding to and navigating a broad and complex codebase, and enabling others to do the same.

Nice-to-Haves

• Experience with data ingestion systems, change data capture (CDC), or building platforms for exporting data from online databases.
• Familiarity with technologies such as ElasticCache, Redis, Kafka, Flink, Druid, or Zookeeper.