Senior Staff Software Engineer, Network Infrastructure

Airbnb was born in 2007 when two hosts welcomed three guests to their San Francisco home, and has since grown to over 5 million hosts who have welcomed over 2 billion guest arrivals in almost every country across the globe. Every day, hosts offer unique stays and experiences that make it possible for guests to connect with communities in a more authentic way.

The Community You Will Join:

Airbnb is a mission-driven company dedicated to helping create a world where anyone can belong anywhere. It takes a unified team committed to our core values to achieve this goal. Airbnb's various functions embody the company's innovative spirit and our fast-moving team is committed to leading as a 21st century company.

The Networking team within Airbnb’s Cloud Infrastructure org owns the entire Airbnb production network infrastructure. The group is responsible for designing, building and operating the  software and solutions that connect all Airbnb users and services, such as traffic proxy and load balancer, service mesh, VPC/backbone and cross-region connectivity, network monitoring and security systems. With users around the world, reliability, scalability, efficiency and high availability are our team’s core concerns.

The Difference You Will Make:

As a technical leader of the network infra team, you will help define and drive the technical strategy and evolution of Airbnb’s network infrastructure. You will be working with talented engineers on cutting edge technologies of cloud native network stack from Layer3 - Layer7. You will contribute to the key infrastructure components that connect all Airbnb users and services across the globe. You will have the chance to define and influence large infrastructure initiatives such as global interconnect architecture, traffic load balancing and disaster recovery, next-gen service mesh, CDN and edge security, etc. 

Airbnb is a member of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) end user community, and we work closely with the open source community (e.g. k8s, istio)  and peer companies to tackle cloud native engineering challenges at scale. You will also have the chance to make an impact on the industry and open source communities.   

A Typical Day: 

• Contribute to and execute the multi-year strategy to evolve Airbnb’s network architecture
• Provide technical leadership on high-impact projects across infrastructure and product teams
• Influence and coach a distributed team of engineers
• Facilitate cross-team alignment on goals, outcomes, and timelines
• Manage project priorities, deadlines, and deliverables
• Work with open source technologies and communities

Your Expertise:

• BS, MS or Ph.D. in computer science or related field, or equivalent work experience
• 12+ years of work experiences in relative areas
• Experience running large scale networking systems and software (e.g. Edge proxies, DNS, CDN, network gateways), experience working with Istio, Envoy is a plus.
• Expertise with network architecture on public cloud providers (e.g. AWS, GCP, Azure) and their network service offerings (e.g., VPC, Security Group, PrivateLink and related products.). 
• You have excellent communication skills and the ability to work well within a team and with teams across the engineering teams.
• You are a strong problem solver and have led a team that is on-call for production infrastructure before.
• You are passionate about efficiency, availability, technical quality and system quality.

Airbnb Cloud Infrastructure in the Media:

• Zero-downtime Istio upgrades across thousands of pods/VMs –Link: InfoQ coverage - 2025
• KubeCon+CloudNativeCon 2024, Link: Secure Outgoing Traffic: Building a powerful Internet Egress Gateway for Reliable connectivity, Edie Yang, Akshita Agarwal. 
• KubeCon+CloudNativeCon 2024, Link: DNS deep dive in k8s with CoreDNS, Jingming Guo
• The Airbnb Tech Blog 2023, Link: Improving Istio Propagation Delay, Ying Zhu  
• KubeCon+CloudNativeCon 2022, Link: Whose packet is it anyway? Life of a packet through service mesh,  Kevin Leimkuhler, Doug Jordan.
• Building simplified service mesh API for developers -2022

Your Location:

This position is US - Remote Eligible. The role may include occasional work at an Airbnb office or attendance at offsites, as agreed to with your manager. While the position is Remote Eligible, you must live in a state where Airbnb, Inc. has a registered entity. Click here for the up-to-date list of excluded states. This list is continuously evolving, so please check back with us if the state you live in is on the exclusion list. If your position is employed by another Airbnb entity, your recruiter will inform you what states you are eligible to work from.

Our Commitment To Inclusion & Belonging:

Airbnb is committed to working with the broadest talent pool possible. We believe diverse ideas foster innovation and engagement, and allow us to attract creatively-led people, and to develop the best products, services and solutions. All qualified individuals are encouraged to apply.

We strive to also provide a disability inclusive application and interview process. If you are a candidate with a disability and require reasonable accommodation in order to submit an application, please contact us at: reasonableaccommodations@airbnb.com. Please include your full name, the role you’re applying for and the accommodation necessary to assist you with the recruiting process. 

We ask that you only reach out to us if you are a candidate whose disability prevents you from being able to complete our online application.

How We'll Take Care of You:

Our job titles may span more than one career level. The actual base pay is dependent upon many factors, such as: training, transferable skills, work experience, business needs and market demands. The base pay range is subject to change and may be modified in the future. This role may also be eligible for bonus, equity, benefits, and Employee Travel Credits.  

Pay Range

$244,000—$305,000 USD