Staff Software Engineer

Role overview

Join Airbnb’s Viaduct team as a Staff Software Engineer. Viaduct is a unified data access layer that connects much of Airbnb’s online data and is a critical part of the company’s tech stack. In this role, you’ll drive reliability and operational excellence, improve runtime resiliency, and help shape Viaduct Modern with an AI-first engineering approach and potential open-source contributions.

Key missions

• Improve platform reliability and operational excellence by designing and implementing:
  • Deployment pipelines
  • SLO frameworks
  • Observability tooling
  • Performance improvements
• Help architect and deliver AI-powered operational tools that:
  • Accelerate incident triage
  • Reduce time to mitigation
  • Enable self-diagnosis/auto-troubleshooting for Viaduct engineers and tenant engineers
• Advance the developer experience for hundreds of engineers by:
  • Designing the next generation of Viaduct Modern
  • Creating shared models for the open-source community

Responsibilities (implied)

• Lead reliability and operational initiatives across platform engineering
• Partner across infrastructure and product engineering teams
• Build scalable monitoring and resilience systems for high-traffic services
• Contribute to developer tooling and platform capabilities

Requirements

• 9+ years of software engineering experience, with strong depth in:
  • Backend systems
  • Distributed architectures
  • Platform engineering
• Proven ability to lead and communicate effectively across teams
• Experience operating critical, high-traffic systems with:
  • Deployment safety
  • Automated rollbacks
  • Progressive delivery strategies
• Deep expertise in observability, including:
  • Designing SLO frameworks
  • Distributed tracing
  • Metrics pipelines at scale
• Reliability engineering track record:
  • Incident response
  • Root cause analysis
  • Building systems with high availability (99.99%+)
• Experience building developer tooling/platforms with a product mindset for developer experience and self-service

Nice-to-haves / preferred

• Familiarity with GraphQL (or similar API gateway/data access layer technologies)
• Strong performance tuning and resource management in JVM-based systems, including:
  • Profiling
  • Garbage collection optimization
  • Concurrency models (blocking I/O, thread pools, coroutines in Kotlin)