Staff Software Engineer, Tech Foundations
About The Position
Airbnb's Observability team builds the platform engineers use to understand how systems behave in production. It collects, processes, stores, and queries metrics, logs, events, and traces from backend services and client apps, supporting both engineers and AI agents. As a Staff Software Engineer, you will set technical direction for a major area of the platform and lead work from design through production. The role focuses on scaling telemetry systems reliably and efficiently, improving access to operational data, controlling telemetry costs, and helping teams detect and debug issues.
Requirements
- 9+ years of industry experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems in production.
- Experience leading the technical direction of a system or multi-team project end to end, including writing the design, aligning stakeholders, delivering the work, and operating it.
- Deep experience at scale in at least one telemetry domain: metrics, logs, or distributed tracing.
- Strong coding skills in Go or Java/Kotlin.
- Comfort working in unfamiliar codebases, including upstream open source.
- Experience with cloud-native infrastructure, including Kubernetes, AWS, and service mesh such as Istio or Envoy.
- Clear written and verbal communication, including design documents and tradeoff analysis for engineering leadership.
Nice To Haves
- Contributions to OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana Mimir, VictoriaMetrics, OpenSearch, Jaeger, or similar projects.
- Experience with time series storage internals, high-cardinality data, or query performance.
- Experience with anomaly detection, automated correlation, or SLO-based alerting.
- Experience with telemetry cost attribution or cost optimization at scale.
- Experience building APIs or tools for AI agents that consume operational data, such as MCP servers.
- Experience with columnar analytics stores such as ClickHouse.
Responsibilities
- Lead the design and delivery of distributed systems that handle tens of millions of events per second, from prototype through production operation.
- Write well-crafted, well-tested, readable, maintainable code and contribute to the open-source projects Airbnb uses.
- Align roadmaps across Observability and partner infrastructure and product teams, and drive build, buy, and open-source decisions.
- Explain tradeoffs and return on investment to engineering leadership in terms of reliability, cost, and developer productivity.
- Mentor engineers and raise the bar on design reviews, operational readiness, and on-call.
- Help Airbnb engineers instrument their services and self-serve when debugging production issues.
- Set technical direction for a major area of the Observability platform and lead it from design through production.
Benefits
- The role may be eligible for a bonus, equity, benefits, and Employee Travel Credits.
Stand Out From the Crowd
Upload your resume and get instant feedback on how well it matches this job.
What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
Education Level
No Education Listed
