# Staff Software Engineer (Technical Lead), Storage 

**Company:** [Airbnb](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/airbnb)
**Location:** Remote
**Role:** DevOps / SRE
**Salary:** $204k – $255k/yr
**Experience:** 9+ years
**Skills:** Distributed Systems, multi-tenant storage, Infrastructure, data ingestion, cdc, elasticcache, Redis, Kafka, Flink, zookeeper, MySQL, druid, mentoring, Technical Leadership
**Posted:** 2026-07-21

> Lead engineering teams building and operating Airbnb's critical online data infrastructure, including distributed KV stores, caching control planes, coordination services, and scalable data ingestion/CDC platforms. Requires 9+ years experience with deep expertise in distributed systems and infrastructure.

## Job Description

## 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.

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