Staff Software Engineer, Service Tools

Airbnb

4h•$212,000 - $265,000•Remote

About The Position

The Service Tools team's mission is to enable Airbnb backend developers to develop, test, and maintain their code quickly and reliably. We own the standard development lifecycle for service owners — from AI-assisted development, through the build system, integration testing and code review, to how services get built for deployment. This represents Airbnb's largest cohort of developers, and you will ultimately be responsible for their productivity. As a Staff Engineer, you will set technical direction rather than only deliver against it. You will own a platform-spanning area of the developer lifecycle end to end — framing the problem, building the measurement that proves it matters, driving a roadmap with partner teams across the company, and growing the engineers who build it with you. The next 18–24 months of this platform are genuinely open: agentic development is changing what the inner loop looks like, and we want someone who wants to help decide what it should become.

Requirements

A track record of owning platform or infrastructure areas end to end — you have set a technical agenda, aligned partner teams behind it, and delivered it over multiple quarters
Deep hands-on experience with build systems and large monorepos; Bazel and remote build execution experience is a strong plus
Extensive JVM experience (Java and/or Kotlin), including the performance, memory, and startup behavior of large builds and test suites
Fluency with the modern AI-assisted development stack — coding agents, skills and context engineering, tool integrations, and evaluating agent quality rigorously rather than anecdotally
A measurement instinct: you reach for data to size a problem and to prove the fix worked, and you are skeptical of metrics that flatter the team
Want to tackle projects with large, open-ended, ambiguous scope, and are comfortable deciding what should exist rather than waiting for a spec
Raise the level of the engineers around you through code reviews, architecture discussions, mentorship, and clear writing
Treat operational excellence and technical debt as first-class roadmap items rather than afterthoughts
Are excited to join an impactful infrastructure team and are motivated to improve your teammates' productivity
9+ years of industry experience with a Bachelor's/Master's degree, or 6+ years with a PhD
Bachelor's and/or Master's degree, preferably in CS, or equivalent experience
Proficiency in one or more back-end server languages (Java/Kotlin/Ruby/Go/C++/etc.)
Experienced in architectural patterns of high-scale distributed products/services, such as well-designed APIs, data pipelines and efficient algorithms
Demonstrated ability to influence stakeholders and drive alignment across teams and functions outside your own reporting line
Experience or desire to work collaboratively in cross-functional teams with design, product and data science partners

Nice To Haves

Bazel and remote build execution experience is a strong plus

Responsibilities

Owning a multi-quarter, platform-spanning workstream — agentic developer workflows, intelligent build infrastructure, test excellence, codebase modernization, or developer observability — as the DRI other teams come to
Advancing our AI-assisted development platform: agent skills and tool integrations, the evaluation harnesses that keep them honest, and the telemetry that shows where a human still has to intervene
Scaling build and merge infrastructure for a very large JVM monorepo: Bazel, remote build execution and caching, merge-queue throughput, test sharding and selection, and the capacity modeling that keeps it all inside budget
Raising the floor on testing — coverage and mutation signal, AI-authored tests, faster local and pre-merge feedback, and testing contracts teams can hold each other to
Leading large-scale codebase modernization (JDK and Kotlin toolchain upgrades, test-framework migrations, build-module migrations) through automated refactoring rather than manual toil
Turning developer and production telemetry into decisions — quantifying where time, spend, and confidence are being lost, and using that to change priorities, including your own team's
Setting standards by example: code and architecture reviews, design docs, incident reviews and postmortems, and anticipating the reliability problem before it pages anyone
Helping to shape the technical strategy that directly moves our core metrics (Developer Experience, Developer Velocity, Debuggability, Resilience and Reliability) while reducing cost
Mentoring and growing engineers on the team in partnership with the engineering manager — multiplying yourself through what you teach, not only what you ship
Partnering with engineering leaders across every Airbnb org to drive adoption of new capabilities. Your customers are all engineers at Airbnb, and adoption is part of the job
Representing the work outside Airbnb where it helps: tech blog posts, conference talks, open source, and vendor partnerships