Senior Software Engineer, Dev Tools

Airbnb

12h•$196,000 - $230,000•Remote

About The Position

The Dev Tools team at Airbnb is focused on enhancing the capabilities of Airbnb engineers and AI agents in building, validating, reviewing, and shipping high-quality software efficiently, reliably, and securely. With the rise of AI-assisted development, the team is building the necessary infrastructure to support increased speed and volume in software delivery. This includes cloud development environments, agent execution platforms, source control, code review, validation tools, and polyglot monorepo tooling.

Requirements

5-9+ years of industry experience (and/or relevant academic experience)
Bachelor’s and/or Master’s degree, preferably in CS, or equivalent experience
Experience leading and shipping large scope technical projects in collaboration with multiple experienced engineers.
Full-cycle developer experience: strong ownership and experience building and operating high-scale, distributed systems across the full software life cycle.
Familiarity with container and orchestration technologies such as Docker and Kubernetes.
Excellent communication skills - ability to explain complex infrastructure tradeoffs to engineers at all levels and drive cross-team alignment without formal authority.
Strong problem-solving and debugging skills.
Passion for developer productivity and improving developer lives.
Experience building systems that run reliably at scale on AWS, including EKS, EC2, EBS, and cloud networking (VPCs, load balancers, VPN tunneling).
Platform thinking: experience building infrastructure that other teams build products on top of, understanding reliability, observability, clear contracts, and graceful failure modes.
Experience treating infrastructure spending as a first-class concern and driving meaningful cost reduction through architectural changes.
Proficiency in Go, Python, or similar server-side languages.

Nice To Haves

Experience with agent or async workloads (operational characteristics of async, autonomous, or long-running compute workloads - pooling, lifecycle management, isolation, secret handling).
Experience with developer tooling (building or contributing to tools engineers use daily).
Experience in Developer environments, remote development platforms, or sandboxed workload execution.
Experience with Infrastructure for AI agents or asynchronous compute workloads.
Experience with CI/CD, integration testing, build systems, or pre-submit validation.
Experience with Git, GitHub Enterprise, source-control infrastructure, or large-scale repository hosting.
Experience with Code-review systems, policy enforcement, code ownership, or automated review tooling.
Experience with Kubernetes operators, workload scheduling, autoscaling, resource isolation, or capacity management.
Experience with Bazel, monorepo tooling, dependency management, or polyglot build infrastructure.
Experience with Platform APIs, control planes, worker pools, caching systems, or distributed queues.
Experience with Authentication, authorization, secrets management, or secure workload execution.
Experience with Infrastructure cost optimization and capacity planning.

Responsibilities

Design, build, and operate foundational systems used across Airbnb engineering.
Work on technically challenging infrastructure problems involving distributed systems, Kubernetes, developer workflows, scalability, reliability, and cost efficiency.
Partner closely with teams across Developer Platform, DevAI, CI/CD, Cloud Infrastructure, and Security.
Shape the technical direction and set the bar for craft on a small, high-impact team.
Build and operate cloud development environments and execution platforms for engineers and AI agents.
Scale Kubernetes-based worker pools, control planes, and APIs for parallel and asynchronous workloads.
Improve AirDev validation for faster pre-CI testing of changes.
Strengthen source-control and code-review systems to handle increased PR volume, automation, and concurrency.
Improve developer workflows across build, test, dependency management, and polyglot monorepo tooling.
Diagnose production issues across distributed systems, networking, storage, and orchestration.
Set technical direction and make high-stakes architectural decisions with significant ambiguity.
Mentor engineers on the team and raise the quality bar through code review and design feedback.