Staff Software Engineer, Build

Airbnb

6d•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: The Developer Infrastructure organization’s mission is to enable Airbnb engineers and AI Coding Agents to ship high quality software with confidence and speed. We work on infrastructure that accelerates Airbnb’s engineering productivity across all stages of the build/test/deploy software development lifecycle. The Difference You Will Make: Build infrastructure has the potential to be one of the highest-leverage investments for our engineering organization as we attempt to accelerate the iteration loop of engineers and AI agents operating within our developer platform. To deliver these improvements, you will operate within the CI+Build team, which owns developer infrastructure that includes remote build systems, CI clusters, flaky test management, and merge queues. The team’s goal is to keep mainline green and PR cycle times fast. Your role will give you the opportunity to define and deliver world-class build systems at Airbnb’s scale, while driving technical direction for build infrastructure spanning multiple platform teams. Our internal customer teams deliver systems used by product engineers across backend, web, and mobile. Furthermore, to be successful in this role, you will need to be comfortable diving into the application architecture of some of our largest internal backend services as we manage a build graph that continues to grow in complexity. A Typical Day: Architecting improvements to our existing Bazel installation, and remote build/cache infrastructure to improve correctness, reproducibility, and speed. Setting the technical roadmap for software build system reliability and performance. Accelerating inner-loop development velocity, along with CI run-times, by diagnosing and resolving build performance bottlenecks, including remote execution efficiency, cache hit rates, and critical path analysis. Driving organizational alignment on build system investments across multiple teams and technical domains. Serving as the technical authority on build systems across Airbnb: setting standards, mentoring senior engineers, and owning build architecture decisions across multiple repos. Partnering with Security on optimizing build processes related to base images. Ensuring a commitment to craft and operational excellence.

Requirements

8+ years industry experience.
Bachelor’s and/or Master’s degree, preferably in CS, or equivalent experience.
Metrics-driven approach to decision-making, with a track record for delivering quantifiable impact and presenting to engineering leadership.
Expertise in Bazel, and concepts such as action graph, dependency analysis, remote caching.
Driving cross-organizational alignment and decisions for investments.
Strong ability to review code.

Responsibilities

Architecting improvements to our existing Bazel installation, and remote build/cache infrastructure to improve correctness, reproducibility, and speed.
Setting the technical roadmap for software build system reliability and performance.
Accelerating inner-loop development velocity, along with CI run-times, by diagnosing and resolving build performance bottlenecks, including remote execution efficiency, cache hit rates, and critical path analysis.
Driving organizational alignment on build system investments across multiple teams and technical domains.
Serving as the technical authority on build systems across Airbnb: setting standards, mentoring senior engineers, and owning build architecture decisions across multiple repos.
Partnering with Security on optimizing build processes related to base images.
Ensuring a commitment to craft and operational excellence.