Staff Software Engineer, Technical Lead - KV Stores & Caching
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 KV Stores & Caching team within Airbnb's Online Data org owns and operates critical pieces of Airbnb's online serving storage systems. Specifically, the team owns and is responsible for: A highly available, low-latency, distributed, multi-tenant KV store for Airbnb. This platform is used by user profiling, Search, ML, and pricing teams, supporting millions of read QPS and providing 99.9+% availability across thousands of customer tables. A set of control planes and clients that manage ElasticCache clusters for hundreds of Airbnb production clusters, at million+ IOPS and million+ indexing QPS. A scalable, reliable, performant distributed coordination service supporting many mission-critical systems (MySQL, Redis, Kafka, Flink, Druid, Zookeeper, etc). The Difference You Will Make: As Technical Lead, you will drive the technical vision and execution for our KV stores and caching infrastructure. You will mentor engineers, shape architectural decisions, and ensure the team delivers high-impact solutions. Examples of the types of challenges you will lead include: Defining the multi-year technical roadmap for caching and KV infrastructure at Airbnb Evolving our KV store from derived-data workloads to support system-of-record use cases, expanding the platform's capabilities and customer base Building a multi-tenant caching solution for Airbnb Guiding the rearchitecture of our KV write path to remove infrastructure complexity while improving replication lag Overseeing frameworks for high-traffic, zero-downtime migrations between critical data platforms
Requirements
- 10+ years of relevant industry experience
- Proven track record of leading and mentoring engineering teams, setting technical direction, and growing engineers in their careers.
- Deep expertise in distributed systems, multi-tenant storage, and infrastructure. You've architected and scaled high-performance, business-critical systems.
- Demonstrated ability to collaborate and influence across teams and organizations, building alignment on technical strategy.
- Strong judgment on technical trade-offs and ability to drive decisions that balance short-term delivery with long-term maintainability.
- Experience onboarding to and navigating a broad and complex codebase, and enabling others to do the same.
Responsibilities
- Defining the multi-year technical roadmap for caching and KV infrastructure at Airbnb
- Evolving our KV store from derived-data workloads to support system-of-record use cases, expanding the platform's capabilities and customer base
- Building a multi-tenant caching solution for Airbnb
- Guiding the rearchitecture of our KV write path to remove infrastructure complexity while improving replication lag
- Overseeing frameworks for high-traffic, zero-downtime migrations between critical data platforms
Benefits
- This role may also be eligible for bonus, equity, benefits, and Employee Travel Credits.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Mid Level
Education Level
No Education Listed
Number of Employees
5,001-10,000 employees
