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’s Storage SRE team owns the “how do you reliably run and operate databases at scale” problem. The team is at the heart of Airbnb’s online data systems, building tooling, workflows, and automation to ensure mission-critical data services are reliable, secure, and performant. You will be joining a team that operates at genuine internet scale and has direct influence on the infrastructure decisions that power a global marketplace.
The team has deep operational ownership of Airbnb’s primary relational database fleet, covering the full lifecycle from provisioning and capacity planning to schema management, backup and recovery, disaster recovery, and client integration best practices. The team also improves the developer experience for engineers working with transactional data stores at scale, enabling engineers across Airbnb to work with high-traffic storage systems reliably and efficiently. Looking ahead, the team is actively expanding its tooling and operational model to support a new class of distributed database technology, partnering closely with storage infrastructure and platform teams to enable resilient adoption across Airbnb.
The Difference You Will Make:
- Own the Storage SRE technical roadmap across a 12+ month horizon, setting the direction for how the team deepens its operational model as it takes on new database technologies alongside its existing systems
- Lead and grow a team of engineers by providing mentorship, timely feedback, and career development support to build a high-performing, inclusive team
- Drive the generalization of cluster lifecycle, schema management, and observability tooling as the team broadens its database technology support
- Partner with engineering teams across Airbnb as the primary expert on reliable database adoption, helping them work with mission-critical storage systems safely and efficiently at scale
- Establish and uphold operational excellence standards covering on-call strategy, incident response, backup and disaster recovery, and systemic reliability improvements
- Collaborate with storage infrastructure and platform teams to ensure Storage SRE’s tooling and observability stay current as the broader storage platform evolves
- Improve the developer experience for engineers working with high-traffic transactional storage systems
- Drive performance, security, scalability, and availability initiatives across Airbnb’s database systems
- Communicate technical strategy and trade-offs clearly to engineers and senior leadership
Your Expertise:
- 9+ years of relevant industry experience in database infrastructure, storage systems, or site reliability engineering
- 3+ years of engineering management experience leading SRE, infrastructure, or platform teams
- Demonstrated track record of building high-performing teams by hiring strong engineers, developing talent, and maintaining team health through periods of change
- Strong technical foundation with the ability to partner with technical leads on architectural decisions, roadmap tradeoffs, and delivery quality
- Proven ability to lead a team through a technology transition while maintaining operational rigor on existing systems
- Solid understanding of distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, and production database operations
- Strong communicator able to cut through ambiguity and represent the team credibly to senior leadership
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: [email protected]. 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.
Skills Required
- 9+ years of relevant industry experience in database infrastructure, storage systems, or site reliability engineering
- 3+ years of engineering management experience leading SRE, infrastructure, or platform teams
- Strong technical foundation with the ability to partner with technical leads on architectural decisions
- Demonstrated track record of building high-performing teams by hiring strong engineers
- Solid understanding of distributed systems and production database operations
Airbnb Compensation & Benefits Highlights
The following summarizes recurring compensation and benefits themes identified from responses generated by popular LLMs to common candidate questions about Airbnb and has not been reviewed or approved by Airbnb.
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Fair & Transparent Compensation — Pay ranges and total compensation components are increasingly disclosed, and country-level pay practices avoid location-based cuts, which feedback suggests improves consistency and perceived fairness.
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Healthcare Strength — Comprehensive core health coverage for employees, mental health resources, and substantial dependent support are repeatedly highlighted as robust and a standout element of the package.
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Leave & Time Off Breadth — Generous PTO, a winter shutdown, sabbaticals, and paid volunteer time are described as extensive, with parental leave and phased return options reinforcing time-off flexibility.
Airbnb Insights
What We Do
Airbnb is a community based on connection and belonging—a community that was born in 2008 when two hosts welcomed three guests to their San Francisco home, and has since grown to 4 million hosts who have welcomed over 800 million guest arrivals to about 100,000 cities in almost every country and region across the globe. Hosts on Airbnb are everyday people who share their worlds to provide guests with the feeling of connection and being at home. At Airbnb, we believe that hosts, guests and the communities where we operate are all stakeholders we have a responsibility to serve, and that by serving them alongside our employees and investors, we will build an enduringly successful company.
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