Senior Software Engineer, Knowledge Graph

Airbnb

5d•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: Search is central to Airbnb’s marketplace, connecting guests with hosts through personalized and relevant experiences. The Knowledge Graph team, within the Search organization, builds the core data infrastructure that powers these experiences. We develop scalable systems to extract, organize, and serve structured knowledge across Airbnb — including places, listings, users, and relationships — enabling better search, recommendations, and personalization. We partner closely with product, machine learning, and platform teams to deliver reliable, high-performance graph data systems that are foundational to Airbnb’s product innovation. The Difference You Will Make: As a Senior Software Engineer with strong industry experience in building large-scale infrastructure systems. You’ll help design and scale the data platform behind Airbnb’s graph system, which powers critical product experiences through intelligent data connections. This is a hands-on, high-impact role focused on scalable data ingestion & consumption, and system performance in production environments.

Requirements

BS/MS/PhD in Computer Science, a related field, or equivalent work experience.
5+ years of industry experience with a BS/Masters, and 3+ years with a PhD.
Proven success in building and maintaining high-scale distributed systems, particularly in data infrastructure, databases, or streaming platforms.
Hands-on experience with technologies like Kafka, Flink, Spark, or similar for data ingestion and processing.
Hands-on experience applying AI/ML techniques to data infrastructure problems.
Strong system design and debugging skills, with a focus on real-world reliability and scalability.

Nice To Haves

Experience with large language models (e.g., Claude, LLMs) for productivity is a plus.

Responsibilities

Partner with infra and product teams to deeply understand use case requirements and define the technical vision for the Knowledge Graph.
Design, build, and scale the end-to-end (E2E) Travel Graph infrastructure, prioritizing a robust and easy-to-use platform for all consumers and producers of graph data.
Lead the large-scale data onboarding strategy, focusing on a user-friendly experience for ingesting diverse data sources (1st and 3rd party data, derived signals) via both batch and Near Real-Time (NRT) pipelines.
Ensure seamless, high-performance integration of the Knowledge Graph with a variety of downstream systems, including Search, Machine Learning, and Analytics.
Debug complex production issues and continuously improve system reliability, observability, and performance.