Staff Backend Engineer (Host Serving and Access)

Role overview

Join Airbnb as a Staff Backend Engineer on the Host Serving and Access team. You will set the technical strategy and architecture for Airbnb’s serving ecosystem, build real-time serving systems, and partner cross-functionally to improve Host pricing-related functionality.

Responsibilities

• Architect and drive technical strategy for the serving ecosystem, ensuring APIs, services, and data pipelines evolve with business needs.
• Develop and optimize real-time serving systems to deliver low-latency, high-throughput APIs for:
  • model predictions
  • personalized recommendations
• Collaborate cross-functionally with Product, Design, Data Science, and ML Engineering to design scalable end-to-end solutions and improve performance.
• Shape long-term workflow strategies and mentor senior engineers.

Requirements

• Strong judgment balancing short-term business needs with long-term technical quality.
• Expertise in backend systems within large-scale, service-oriented architectures.
• Experience influencing cross-functional partners and engineering teams.
• Proven ability to lead teams, set technical strategy, and deliver high-impact outcomes.
• Excellent communication and cross-team collaboration.
• 9+ years of engineering experience with a BS/MS or PhD in Computer Science or similar.
• Strong problem-solving and production debugging skills.

Nice-to-haves

• A track record of leading or launching high-impact models (explicitly referenced in the profile).