Senior Software Engineer, Service Tools
Airbnb
Job Overview
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Job Description
Senior Software Engineer, Service Tools at Airbnb
Airbnb was born in 2007 when two hosts welcomed three guests to their San Francisco home, and has since grown to over 5 million hosts who have welcomed over 2 billion guest arrivals in almost every country across the globe. Every day, hosts offer unique stays and experiences that make it possible for guests to connect with communities in a more authentic way.
The Community You Will Join
Airbnb is a mission-driven company dedicated to helping create a world where anyone can belong anywhere. It takes a unified team committed to our core values to achieve this goal. Airbnb's various functions embody the company's innovative spirit and our fast-moving team is committed to leading as a 21st century company.
The Difference You Will Make
The Service Tools team’s mission is to enable Airbnb backend developers to develop, test, and maintain their code quickly and reliably. This team is responsible for the standard development lifecycle for service owners—everything from AI Integration for service development, to how integration tests work, to building services for deployment. This represents Airbnb’s largest cohort of developers, you will ultimately be responsible for their productivity.
A Typical Day
As a Senior Software Engineer, Service Tools, you will work on technologies that help shape an industry-leading end to end developer experience for backend developers. In this role you will be:
- Building our next-gen build system using the latest technologies (e.g., Bazel).
- Working on integrations between the build system and CI/CD tooling (e.g., merge queues, code coverage, integration testing).
- Improving the editor (e.g., IntelliJ) experience for all backend developers.
- Helping to shape the technical strategy that directly moves our core metrics (Developer Experience, Developer Velocity, Debuggability, Resilience and Reliability) while reducing cost.
- Partnering with engineering leaders across all Airbnb teams for adoption of the new capabilities. Your customers will be all engineers at Airbnb.
- A player/coach of our high-performance team to ensure code quality, commitment to craft and operational excellence.
Your Expertise
- FLUENT IN ENGLISH (PROFESSIONAL LEVEL)
- 6+ years industry experience.
- Bachelor’s and/or Master’s degree, preferably in CS, or equivalent experience.
- Proficiency in one or more back-end server languages (Java/Ruby/Go/C++/etc.).
- Experienced in architectural patterns of a high-scale distributed products/services, such as well-designed APIs, data pipelines and efficient algorithms.
- Experience or desire to work collaboratively in cross-functional teams with design, product and data science partners.
- Experience working directly on build systems, and even better if you have hands-on experience with Bazel.
- Experience working with large monorepos.
- Extensive JVM experience.
- Want to tackle projects with large open-ended scope and drive significant business impact.
- Love collaborating via product reviews, code reviews and architecture discussions.
- Are motivated to improve their teammates’ productivity.
- Are excited to join an impactful infrastructure team.
Our Commitment To Inclusion & Belonging
Airbnb is committed to working with the broadest talent pool possible. We believe diverse ideas foster innovation and engagement, and allow us to attract creatively-led people, and to develop the best products, services and solutions. All qualified individuals are encouraged to apply.
We strive to also provide a disability inclusive application and interview process. If you are a candidate with a disability and require reasonable accommodation in order to submit an application, please contact us at: reasonableaccommodations@airbnb.com. Please include your full name, the role you’re applying for and the accommodation necessary to assist you with the recruiting process.
We ask that you only reach out to us if you are a candidate whose disability prevents you from being able to complete our online application.
Key skills/competency
- Backend Development
- Build Systems
- Distributed Systems
- Developer Experience
- CI/CD
- Java
- JVM
- API Design
- Scalability
- Monorepos
How to Get Hired at Airbnb
- Research Airbnb's culture: Study their mission, values, recent news, and employee testimonials on LinkedIn and Glassdoor.
- Tailor your resume: Highlight experience in build systems, distributed systems, and Bazel proficiency.
- Showcase problem-solving: Prepare examples of how you've solved complex system design and tooling challenges.
- Understand developer tools: Demonstrate expertise in CI/CD pipelines, developer velocity, and improving engineering workflows.
- Network strategically: Connect with current Airbnb engineers on LinkedIn to gain insights into team dynamics and projects.
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