Staff Software Engineer, Data Authoring

Airbnb

1d•$212,000 - $265,000•Remote

About The Position

Airbnb's Data Authoring Platform exists to turn raw data into decision-grade insight, fast, reliable, and at scale. We provide a single, paved path for 4,000+ internal data producers and consumers to model, transform, and serve trustworthy data and metrics that power everything from A/B experimentation to executive dashboards. What we own: Minerva, Airbnb's semantic layer & metrics platform, ensuring one definition of truth across the company. The end-to-end data-authoring framework that cuts through pipeline boilerplate and accelerates iteration, pipeline testing, and validation. Tooling for reliability, governance, and cost-efficiency, including automated testing, anomaly detection, and right-sized materialization. The difference you will make As a Staff Software Engineer focused on Minerva, you will own and drive high-impact workstreams end to end. You'll take ambiguous problem spaces, such as making experimentation faster and easier, talk to users, define the work, and deliver it. Your work will help thousands of internal users define, understand, and consume trustworthy business metrics across product, finance, BI, and experimentation. Engineers, designers, and product leaders rely on these tools to explore and develop new product experiences and to run experiments that tell them what is right for our customers. Depending on your background, you may partner closely with the experimentation team to find gaps and shape how Minerva serves them. We believe data is the voice of our customers at scale. The tools you build will help improve the Airbnb product for every guest and host.

Requirements

9+ years of hands-on software engineering, with the majority of your time spent building and deploying production applications and services (rather than writing configuration and SQL).
Deep proficiency in at least one modern general-purpose language (e.g., Java, Kotlin, Scala, Go, Python, TypeScript).
Experience working on data platforms or data tooling, with a good understanding of why users want to do what they do with data. Prior data engineering or data science experience is a plus, but software engineering should be your primary focus.
Demonstrated ability to independently scope and drive ambiguous, cross-team projects from design through launch.
Strong command of OOP, API design, and distributed systems patterns.
Strong communication skills and experience working across complex team and system interfaces.

Nice To Haves

Experience with experimentation platforms (assignment, metrics, analysis, or experiment tooling).
Experience with metrics, semantic layer, BI, or analytics platforms (e.g., dbt, Tableau, Superset).
Experience with query engines, query rewriting/optimization, or data warehouse internals.
Experience authoring DSLs, compilers, or APIs that abstract data transformations.

Responsibilities

Build and extend Minerva's core services, including our query rewriting service.
Take on loosely defined problems, partner with users and teams to scope them, and propose and deliver solutions.
Track semantic layer techniques and database engine capabilities to inform priorities.
Partner with teams across the company to make data easier to query and use.
Own design, implementation, testing, and on-call for the systems you build.