Senior Software Engineer, App Foundation (Backend)

Role overview

You’ll join Airbnb’s App Foundation team, a cross-platform group building high-quality, performant capabilities that power most features in Airbnb’s Guest and Host ecosystem. The work spans app product frameworks, insights & logging, performance & app health, and feature architecture.

What you’ll do

• Explore and deliver backend product experiences with cross-functional partners (Design, Product), from ideation through large-scale implementation.
• Build efficient, reusable backend capabilities while maintaining performance and scalable system design.
• Lead initiatives that measurably improve Guest and Host experience by improving app responsiveness and reliability across backend paths used by millions.
• Drive a performance roadmap by:
  • identifying bottlenecks
  • prioritizing work by impact
  • improving services, data access patterns, and infrastructure
• Raise the bar on performance engineering by building tooling, benchmarks, and guardrails to prevent regressions.
• Influence architecture and standards across Airbnb’s backend ecosystem to make systems more observable, efficient, and easier to evolve.

Typical responsibilities

• Collaborate with design, product, and data science to define and ship impactful features.
• Propose architectural patterns (e.g., well-designed APIs, data pipelines, efficient algorithms).
• Write unit and integration tests and review others’ code.
• Monitor service-level performance metrics, triage anomalies/regressions, and profile/debug performance issues across service boundaries.
• Implement fixes such as:
  • query optimization
  • caching strategies
  • concurrency improvements
  • payload reduction
• Partner on critical request flows by aligning on SLOs, rollout plans, and measurement strategies.
• Document learnings and create playbooks so performance improvements scale beyond a single service.

Requirements

• 5+ years of software development experience.
• Strong expertise in one or more backend/server languages (e.g., Java, Kotlin, C++).
• Proven experience scaling high-traffic, distributed products/systems.
• Deep backend skills including databases, cloud technologies, and asynchronous messaging systems.
• Strong end-to-end ownership mindset across team boundaries.
• Collaborative approach with engineering and product partners.
• Ability to work on large, open-ended scope with significant business impact.
• Ability to self-serve data analysis and make data-driven decisions.
• Strong attention to detail.