Senior Backend Software Engineer, Media Ingestion & Serving

Role overview

Senior Backend Software Engineer for Airbnb’s Media Foundation team, focused on building scalable and reliable backend systems that power Airbnb’s media experiences (photos, videos, animations). You’ll collaborate with backend, infrastructure, and cross-platform engineers to deliver media ingestion, processing, and serving capabilities at very large scale.

What you’ll do

• Design, build, and maintain backend services and data pipelines for media ingestion, processing, and serving.
• Develop platform capabilities that let ML/AI teams trigger analysis workflows, store extracted metadata, and make media intelligence accessible to product surfaces.
• Partner with product teams to understand media needs and build self-serve solutions.
• Continuously improve performance, reliability, and cost-efficiency of media infrastructure.
• Lead initiatives such as:
  • Triggering ML/AI analysis on media assets and serving results via metadata.
  • Reducing infrastructure costs via in-house image transformations, storage optimizations, and vendor consolidation.
  • Expanding serving capabilities for images, videos, and additional media types.
• Stay current with trends in distributed systems, media processing, ML infrastructure, and workflow orchestration; mentor and guide team members.

Your expertise

• 5+ years of backend engineering experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems.
• Demonstrated experience with media technologies such as image processing, video transcoding, or metadata management.
• Experience building data pipelines and batch processing systems, especially those supporting ML/AI workflows.
• Proficiency in Java or Kotlin (or similar), including designing APIs and data models.
• Strong collaboration and communication skills with cross-functional teams.

Location / work model

• US - Remote Eligible (may include occasional office work or offsites as agreed with your manager).