Staff Software Engineer, Service Tools

Airbnb is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to join the Service Tools team, which enables backend developers to develop, test, and maintain code quickly and reliably. The team owns the standard development lifecycle for service owners, from AI-assisted development through build system, integration testing, code review, and deployment. As a Staff Engineer, you will set technical direction, own a platform-spanning area of the developer lifecycle end to end, and drive a roadmap with partner teams.

• Own multi-quarter, platform-spanning workstreams such as agentic developer workflows, intelligent build infrastructure, test excellence, codebase modernization, or developer observability.
• Advance the AI-assisted development platform, including agent skills, tool integrations, evaluation harnesses, and telemetry.
• Scale build and merge infrastructure for a large JVM monorepo, including Bazel, remote build execution, caching, merge-queue throughput, test sharding, and capacity modeling.
• Raise the floor on testing with coverage and mutation signal, AI-authored tests, and faster feedback loops.
• Lead large-scale codebase modernization (JDK and Kotlin toolchain upgrades, test-framework migrations) through automated refactoring.
• Turn developer and production telemetry into decisions, quantifying where time, spend, and confidence are lost.
• Set standards through code and architecture reviews, design docs, incident reviews, and postmortems.
• Mentor and grow engineers in partnership with the engineering manager.
• Partner with engineering leaders across Airbnb to drive adoption of new capabilities.
• Represent the work externally through tech blog posts, conference talks, open source, and vendor partnerships.

• Track record of owning platform or infrastructure areas end to end, setting technical agenda and delivering over multiple quarters.
• Deep hands-on experience with build systems and large monorepos; Bazel and remote build execution experience is a strong plus.
• Extensive JVM experience (Java and/or Kotlin), including performance, memory, and startup behavior of large builds and test suites.
• Fluency with modern AI-assisted development stack, including coding agents, skills, context engineering, tool integrations, and rigorous evaluation.
• Measurement instinct: use data to size problems and prove fixes, skeptical of flattering metrics.
• Comfort with large, open-ended, ambiguous scope and deciding what should exist.
• Raise the level of engineers through code reviews, architecture discussions, mentorship, and clear writing.
• Treat operational excellence and technical debt as first-class roadmap items.
• Minimum: 9+ years industry experience with Bachelor's/Master's, or 6+ years with PhD; Bachelor's/Master's preferably in CS or equivalent; proficiency in one or more back-end languages (Java/Kotlin/Ruby/Go/C++/etc.); experience in architectural patterns of high-scale distributed products/services; demonstrated ability to influence stakeholders; experience working in cross-functional teams.

Base pay range: $212,000—$265,000 USD. This role may also be eligible for bonus, equity, benefits, and Employee Travel Credits.

This position is US - Remote Eligible. The role may include occasional work at an Airbnb office or attendance at offsites, as agreed with your manager. You must live in a state where Airbnb, Inc. has a registered entity; see the up-to-date list of excluded states.

Apply via the provided link. For disability accommodations, contact reasonableaccommodations@airbnb.com.