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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.
Airbnb's Online Data organization gives every engineer at Airbnb the power to build real-time data experiences — through simple, intuitive tools, without needing deep database expertise.
Within Online Data, the Storage Foundation team owns the online serving stores and databases that power Airbnb. We build and operate Airbnb's source-of-truth database: an open-source, distributed NewSQL system running on stateful Kubernetes. It stores critical data — users, listings, and more — and handles over half of all of Airbnb's online OLTP traffic. Our charter: keep this database reliable, secure, scalable, fast, correct, well-tested, and cost-efficient — at Airbnb's scale.
The Community You Will Join
We're hiring two roles within the Database team. Both are described below.
- Database Performance & Reliability: Dig into the internals of a large-scale, multi-tenant, distributed database — storage, query execution, consensus, change data capture, and shard routing and management. You'll root-cause hard performance, reliability, and stability issues, and partner directly with our open-source database vendor to land fixes upstream.
- Database Quality & Automation: Build the testing and quality infrastructure that lets us move fast with confidence on an open-source database. You'll bring tools like Jepsen and other database benchmarks into Airbnb's in-house testing stack, drive CI integration with OSS test suites, and design creative solutions for database tiering and representative load shadowing. As AI accelerates development speed and our availability bar climbs toward 99.99%, this role becomes only more critical to how fast and safely we can ship.
Examples of the Difference You'll Make
- Build the frameworks and tooling around monitoring, observability, permissions, and service discovery integration.
- Dig into the query and storage layers to explain latency differences between B-tree and LSM-based storage engines.
- Design and implement traffic prioritization at the storage layer for connection pooling, CPU prioritization, and reason about traffic
- Test, validate and safely roll out a new CDC architecture while guaranteeing full transactional correctness across shards.
Your Expertise
- 5+ years building and operating large-scale, Tier 0 distributed systems.
- Hands-on experience with database or storage internals: query execution, storage engines, replication, consensus and testing.
- Ability to own and dive deeply into a complex codebase, ideally an open-source one.
- Experience developing code, maintaining, analyzing, and debugging high-severity production incidents, leveraging AI agents.
- Strong collaboration and communication skills in a remote working environment.
- Strong ownership and a consistent track record of delivery.
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.
Equal Employment Opportunity:
Airbnb values diversity & belonging and is proud to be an Equal Employment Opportunity employer. All individuals seeking employment at Airbnb are considered without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, age, gender, sex, marital status, ancestry, physical or mental disability, veteran status, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, or any other legally protected characteristic.
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.
Reasonable Accommodations: We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations throughout the recruitment process for applicants with disabilities. If you need assistance, or an accommodation, please let your recruiter know once you are contacted about a role.
A Note on Recruiting Scams: Scammers sometimes pose as Airbnb recruiters to get money or personal information from candidates. A few things that will always be true for Airbnb’s hiring process: our open roles are posted on Airbnb’s Career’s Page at careers.airbnb.com, and our recruiters correspond only from @airbnb.com or @ext.airbnb.com email addresses. Our recruiters will never ask for your Social Security number, bank account details, passport, or payment app information while you are interviewing. We’ll also never ask you to pay a fee, send money, deposit or cash a check, or purchase work-related equipment (such as a company laptop) during the interview process. We encourage candidates to remain vigilant of these recruiting scams and not share sensitive information if you do not believe an individual is actually affiliated with Airbnb.
Skills Required
- 5+ years building and operating large-scale distributed systems, including storage, data ingestion, backup and restore, or streaming
- Hands-on experience with database or storage internals, such as query execution, storage engines, replication, or consensus
- Ability to own and deeply understand a complex codebase, ideally an open-source codebase
- Experience maintaining, analyzing, and debugging high-severity production incidents
- Ability to write clean, testable, and maintainable code
- Strong collaboration and communication skills in a remote working environment
- Strong ownership and consistent track record of delivery
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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Wellbeing & Lifestyle Benefits — Travel credits, an annual education allowance, and a quarterly “Live and Work Anywhere” allowance are highlighted as distinctive perks that complement flexible work arrangements. Feedback suggests these benefits are especially valuable for remote employees and frequent travelers.
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Equity Value & Accessibility — Equity grants, an employee stock-purchase plan, and annual bonuses are positioned as meaningful parts of total compensation. Feedback suggests stock and incentives materially enhance pay, particularly in technical and corporate roles.
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Healthcare Strength — Subsidized healthcare and mental-health support are prominently included, alongside paid time off and employer-matched retirement plans. Feedback suggests this breadth establishes a strong baseline of coverage.
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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