Senior Backend Engineer, GraphQL

Airbnb

19d•Remote

About The Position

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: Viaduct is a unified data access layer and platform connecting almost all of Airbnb’s online data. Almost 70% of Airbnb’s online traffic and products flow through the Viaduct infrastructure service. Residing at the center of Airbnb’s tech stack between the user-facing products and backend infrastructure, Viaduct provides a global schema & query system through a GraphQL interface. Our team mission: “Empower app developers at Airbnb by delivering a seamless and efficient tenant developer experience. We strive to maximize productivity and spark creativity through simplified APIs, improved performance, and the cultivation of tenant team autonomy.” The Viaduct team is a very tenured and experienced team, setting the best practices and next-gen architecture for Airbnb. We work closely with infrastructure teams (Build Infra, Service Platform, CI/CD, Reliability, Observability, Developer Experience to name a few) as well as product engineers. We treat our Platform as a Product and follow the principles of good Platform Engineering The Difference You Will Make: Viaduct has been running in production for over five years and the team has gained a lot of insights and experience in operating a GraphQL platform at scale. These insights informed the major rewrite - called Viaduct Modern - which we are about to finish in 2026. You will join the effort to finish and launch Viaduct Modern which drastically improves the developer experience of hundreds of engineers at Airbnb. For over five years, Viaduct has operated successfully in production, providing the team with extensive insights into running a large-scale GraphQL platform. This experience has led to a major rewrite, "Viaduct Modern," which is nearing completion in 2026. You will be a key contributor in the finalization and launch of Viaduct Modern, a project that will significantly enhance the developer experience for hundreds of engineers across Airbnb. Viaduct has been released as an Open Source project. Your contributions to the Viaduct platform will not only serve Airbnb-internal developers, but also any member of the Open Source community who chooses to adopt Viaduct.Viaduct is now an Open Source project. As a result, your contributions to the Viaduct platform will have an impact beyond internal Airbnb developers, benefiting the broader Open Source community that adopts Viaduct.

Requirements

6+ years of experience in a relevant role - ideally in a team that owned a developer platform
Proficiency and interest working cross-team with both product and infrastructure engineers
Experience operating critical online backend services
Comfort shipping high visibility, complex coding projects

Nice To Haves

expertise with GraphQL, Kotlin, AI-enabled development flows

Responsibilities

Driving partnerships with tenant product teams to inform the tooling roadmap as well as taking on metrics and tracing scaling challenges that push the boundaries of our existing observability infrastructure
Frequently working in vaguely scoped areas, responsible for defining project requirements for improving reliability and performance, through Viaduct framework changes and tenant-centric observability
Developing technical expertise in Viaduct framework as well as informed with product teams’ use cases and requests
Supporting the customer base of Viaduct developers and ensuring that their code gets deployed daily to production
Get into the flow during daily and intentional Focus Time blocks

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