{"id":3633592,"url":"https://alion.io/job/airbnb-staff-software-engineer-tech-foundations-2","title":"Staff Software Engineer, Tech Foundations","company":{"id":77,"name":"Airbnb","domain":"airbnb.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/airbnb","size_band":"1001-5000","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Greenhouse","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":83,"open_postings":55,"ghost_share":0.018,"stale_share":0.582,"repost_share":0.073,"time_to_fill_p50_days":44,"computed_at":"2026-11-05T05:54:30Z"}},"role":"Backend","role_family":"Backend","seniority":"staff","employment_type":null,"work_mode":"remote","remote_scope":"stated_countries","remote_scope_basis":"board_field","remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":["US"],"hiring_countries_total":1,"salary":{"min":212000,"max":265000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":265000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":9,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"Apache Kafka","optional":false},{"name":"AWS","optional":false},{"name":"ClickHouse","optional":false},{"name":"Envoy","optional":false},{"name":"Go","optional":false},{"name":"Grafana","optional":false},{"name":"Istio","optional":false},{"name":"Jaeger","optional":false},{"name":"Java","optional":false},{"name":"Kotlin","optional":false},{"name":"Kubernetes","optional":false},{"name":"Mimir","optional":false},{"name":"OpenSearch","optional":false},{"name":"OpenTelemetry","optional":false},{"name":"Prometheus","optional":false},{"name":"Service Mesh","optional":false},{"name":"Time Series","optional":false},{"name":"VictoriaMetrics","optional":false},{"name":"Model Context Protocol","optional":true},{"name":"SLI/SLO/SLA","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-11-02T19:03:07Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-11-02","last_verified_at":"2026-11-05T10:45:50Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":2,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":2},"description":"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.\nThe Community You Will Join:\nAirbnb's mission is to create a world where people can Belong Anywhere. Our community of guests and hosts rely on Airbnb around the clock to facilitate millions of stays and experiences per day.\nThe Observability team builds the platform Airbnb engineers use to understand how their systems behave in production. We collect, process, store, and query metrics, logs, events, and traces from both backend services and client apps. Our metrics platform alone ingests tens of millions of samples per second across more than a billion active time series. AI agents are now consumers of this data alongside engineers: they query telemetry to write and validate code and to help debug production issues. We continue to invest in reliable and efficient real time system for both AI and human access.\nThe Difference You Will Make:\nAs a Staff engineer, you will set the technical direction for a major area of the Observability platform and lead it from design through production. Problems in front of us include:\nScaling the metrics pipeline (OpenTelemetry, vmagent, Grafana Mimir) while controlling cost through aggregation, sampling, and blocking unused metrics.\nReplacing legacy log aggregation with an OpenTelemetry-based pipeline, and evolving log and trace storage on OpenSearch.\nBuilding a fast, reliable query layer for both engineers and AI agents, with rate limiting, access control, isolation, and caching so agent traffic does not slow down incident response.\nGiving teams self-service visibility and control over their telemetry cost: unit cost per team and service, and controls for granularity, sampling, and retention.\nImproving time to detect with anomaly detection and automated correlation across signals.\nA Typical Day:\nLead the design and delivery of distributed systems that handle tens of millions of events per second, from prototype to production operation.\nWrite well-crafted, well-tested, readable, maintainable code, and contribute back to the open-source projects we run on.\nAlign roadmaps across Observability and partner infrastructure and product teams, and drive build, buy, and open-source decisions.\nExplain tradeoffs and return on investment to engineering leadership in terms of reliability, cost, and developer productivity.\nMentor engineers on the team and raise the bar on design reviews, operational readiness, and on-call.\nHelp Airbnb engineers instrument their services and self-serve when debugging production issues.\nYour Expertise:\n9+ years of industry experience, with a track record of building and operating large-scale distributed systems in production.\nLed the technical direction of a system or multi-team project end to end: wrote the design, aligned stakeholders, delivered it, and operated it.\nDeep experience in at least one telemetry domain at scale: metrics (Prometheus, Grafana Mimir, VictoriaMetrics), logs (OpenSearch, Kafka), or distributed tracing (OpenTelemetry, Jaeger, ClickHouse).\nStrong coding skills in Go or Java/Kotlin, and comfortable working in unfamiliar codebases, including upstream open source.\nExperience with cloud-native infrastructure: Kubernetes, AWS, and service mesh (Istio, Envoy).\nClear written and verbal communication, including design docs and tradeoff analysis for engineering leadership.\nNice to Have:\nContributions to OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana Mimir, VictoriaMetrics, OpenSearch, Jaeger, or similar projects.\nExperience with time series storage internals, high-cardinality data, or query performance.\nAnomaly detection, automated correlation, or SLO-based alerting.\nTelemetry cost attribution or cost optimization at scale.\nBuilding APIs or tools for AI agents that consume operational data, such as MCP servers.\nColumnar analytics stores such as ClickHouse.\nYour Location:\nThis position is US - Remote Eligible. The role may include occasional work at an Airbnb office or attendance at offsites, as agreed to with your manager. While the position is Remote Eligible, you must live in a state where Airbnb, Inc. has a registered entity. Click here for the up-to-date list of excluded states. This list is continuously evolving, so please check back with us if the state you live in is on the exclusion list. If your position is employed by another Airbnb entity, your recruiter will inform you what states you are eligible to work from.\nOur Commitment To Inclusion & Belonging:\nAirbnb 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.\nWe 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: . Please include your full name, the role you’re applying for and the accommodation necessary to assist you with the recruiting process. \nWe 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.\nEqual Employment Opportunity:\nAirbnb values diversity & belonging and is proud to be an Equal Employment Opportunity employer. All individuals seeking employment at Airbnb are considered without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, age, gender, sex, marital status, ancestry, physical or mental disability, veteran status, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, or any other legally protected characteristic.\nHow We'll Take Care of You:\nOur job titles may span more than one career level. The actual base pay is dependent upon many factors, such as: training, transferable skills, work experience, business needs and market demands. The base pay range is subject to change and may be modified in the future. This role may also be eligible for bonus, equity, benefits, and Employee Travel Credits. \nPay Range\n$212,000—$265,000 USD\nReasonable Accommodations: We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations throughout the recruitment process for applicants with disabilities. If you need assistance, or an accommodation, please let your recruiter know once you are contacted about a role.\nA Note on Recruiting Scams: Scammers sometimes pose as Airbnb recruiters to get money or personal information from candidates. A few things that will always be true for Airbnb’s hiring process: our open roles are posted on Airbnb’s Career’s Page at careers.airbnb.com, and our recruiters correspond only from @airbnb.com or @ ext.airbnb.com email addresses. Our recruiters will never ask for your Social Security number, bank account details, passport, or payment app information while you are interviewing. We’ll also never ask you to pay a fee, send money, deposit or cash a check, or purchase work-related equipment (such as a company laptop) during the interview process. We encourage candidates to remain vigilant of these recruiting scams and not share sensitive information if you do not believe an individual is actually affiliated with Airbnb.","description_format":"text","description_chars":7558,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":9,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Equity"],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"United States","iso":"US","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Vacation Rentals","Online Rental Platforms","Travel Technology"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-11-02T20:40:13Z"}],"visa":[{"country":"US","licensed_sponsor":true,"evidence":"H-1B filings in 12 months: 217 · green card filings: 26","filings_12m":217,"filings_prev_12m":224,"green_card_filings_12m":26,"median_offered_wage_usd":192500,"route":null,"cap_exempt":false,"checked_at":"2026-10-29T16:27:21+00:00","sources":["US Department of Labor: LCA disclosure data (H-1B, H-1B1, E-3)","US Department of Labor: PERM disclosure data (green cards)"],"filings_for_role_12m":146}],"liveness":{"score":63,"band":"ok","label":"Likely open","p_open":1,"p_active":0.632,"p_room":1,"age_days":2,"expected_fill_days":44,"reasons":["conf:0","stale_co","velocity","win:early","comp:brand"],"computed_at":"2026-11-05T05:54:30Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":265000,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/airbnb-staff-software-engineer-tech-foundations-2","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/airbnb-staff-software-engineer-tech-foundations-2.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-11-05T14:17:15Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":18469,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-11-06T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":77},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=77"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fairbnb-staff-software-engineer-tech-foundations-2"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fairbnb-staff-software-engineer-tech-foundations-2"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fairbnb-staff-software-engineer-tech-foundations-2"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/airbnb-staff-software-engineer-tech-foundations-2\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fairbnb-staff-software-engineer-tech-foundations-2"}],"agent":{"mcp":"https://alion.io/mcp/jobs","mcp_open":"https://alion.io/mcp/open","next":[{"tool":"get_job","arguments":{"id":3633592}},{"tool":"search_jobs","arguments":{"company":"airbnb.com","detail":"compact"}},{"tool":"match_people","arguments":{"job_id":3633592},"note":"people open to offers who fit this vacancy"}],"note":"The same data through MCP tools: https://alion.io/mcp/open needs no sign-in (compact searches, postings, people); https://alion.io/mcp with an Alion account has everything. Docs: https://alion.io/developers"}}