Senior Software Engineer, Storage
About The Position
The Senior Software Engineer will join Airbnb's Database Kernel team within the Transactional Storage Services team in the Online Data organization. The team owns performance, reliability, and stability for Airbnb's NewSQL database engine, focusing on the storage layer and query execution engine and also covering consensus and shard management. The database is an open-source, horizontally scalable NewSQL system running on stateful Kubernetes and stores critical user, listing, and financial data. The role involves investigating database internals to diagnose and resolve SQL latency and availability issues, tuning database behavior for Airbnb's workloads, and collaborating with the open-source database vendor on root cause analysis and upstream fixes. The position requires deep database engineering experience, strong ownership, and effective collaboration in a remote working environment.
Requirements
- At least 5 years of software engineering experience, including significant hands-on work on a database storage layer or query execution engine.
- Strong SQL skills and understanding of how queries are planned, optimized, and executed at the engine level.
- Deep understanding of storage engine internals, such as B-tree/LSM, compaction, indexing, and I/O, and/or query processing, such as planning, optimization, and execution operators.
- Ability to own and dive deeply into a complex database codebase.
- Experience analyzing and debugging high-severity production incidents, especially performance and latency problems.
- Ability to write clean, testable, maintainable code.
- Strong collaboration and communication skills in a remote working environment.
- Strong ownership and a consistent track record of delivery.
Nice To Haves
- Experience with distributed databases, including replication, consensus, and transactions.
- Familiarity with NewSQL systems such as TiDB.
- Experience contributing to an open-source database codebase.
Responsibilities
- Analyze query plans and execution paths—including planning, optimization, operators, and distributed execution—to find and resolve sources of SQL latency.
- Investigate query and storage layers to explain latency differences between B-tree and LSM-based storage engines.
- Tune storage engine behavior, including compaction, caching, and I/O, for Airbnb's workloads.
- Design and implement traffic prioritization at the storage layer for connection pooling.
- Lead root cause analysis of high-severity incidents with the open-source vendor and contribute fixes upstream.
- Own and work deeply in a complex database codebase.
Benefits
- The role may be eligible for bonus, equity, benefits, and Employee Travel Credits.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
Education Level
No Education Listed
