Senior Staff Software Engineer, Tech Foundations
About The Position
Airbnb is seeking a highly skilled and experienced Senior Staff Engineer to join its Site Reliability Engineering team. This senior technical individual contributor will help develop a best-in-class, enterprise-wide SRE program and long-term reliability strategy, while ensuring the performance and reliability of Airbnb’s infrastructure and products. The role partners with engineering teams to provide tools, processes, and expertise that make services easier to operate and more reliable, and addresses broader infrastructure challenges through team support and hands-on project work. Senior Software Engineers are expected to contribute code and/or participate in architecture and design. The position combines technical strategy and implementation with organizational influence and team leadership. The engineer will shape company-wide SRE architecture, engineering standards, incident management, and production readiness, while fostering a proactive reliability culture and partnering with product engineering teams on large-scale distributed systems. The role also includes mentoring and supporting Site Reliability Engineers through servant leadership, advocacy, and allyship.
Requirements
- Bachelor's, master's, or Ph.D. in computer science or a related field, or equivalent work experience.
- 12+ years of software engineering experience, with a significant portion dedicated to system architecture and design in consumer-facing technology companies.
- 5+ years of experience as a senior-level technical lead or architect, driving technical direction and strategy across multiple teams or projects.
- Strong leadership skills.
- Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with a proven record of working effectively across teams and organizations.
- Demonstrated expertise building and scaling high-availability systems and platforms.
- Deep understanding of multi-cloud environments.
Responsibilities
- Develop a long-term reliability roadmap and serve as a strategic thought partner within the organization.
- Design, implement, and influence company-wide SRE architecture, innovation, engineering, and standards.
- Create scalable incident management processes; assess incident management and response, and reduce operational toil.
- Foster an SRE and reliability model that accounts for engineering teams' ownership of their services.
- Optimize infrastructure and platforms to support highly available and performant systems, with a strong customer focus.
- Develop production readiness standards to ensure service reliability.
- Automate where possible, configure systems as code, predict future failures, and proactively mitigate them.
- Advocate for and implement reliable design patterns, such as circuit breakers and graceful degradation.
- Build a culture in which reliability is a proactive mindset, identifying patterns and opportunities to improve leverage and tooling.
- Build deep partnerships with engineering leaders and work with product engineering teams on design and implementation choices for large-scale distributed systems.
- Partner with the broader organization to learn from incidents through blameless postmortems.
- Mentor and lead Site Reliability Engineers and support others through servant leadership, mentorship, advocacy, and allyship.
- Contribute code and/or participate in architecture and design.
Benefits
- The role may be eligible for a bonus.
- The role may be eligible for equity.
- The role may be eligible for benefits.
- Employee Travel Credits.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
