Senior Backend Engineer, Viaduct

Airbnb was born in 2007 when two Hosts welcomed three guests to their San Francisco home, and has since grown to over 4 million Hosts who have welcomed more than 1 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 powered by our Host and Guest communities. Our Users, Listings and Platforms team is a group responsible for creating new products for our Guests and Hosts. Viaduct is a unified data access layer and platform connecting almost all of Airbnb’s online data. Today, 65% of Airbnb’s online traffic and products flow through the Viaduct infrastructure service. Residing at the center of Airbnb’s tech stack between the user-facing products and backend infrastructure, Viaduct provides a global schema & query system through a GraphQL interface. Our team mission is to “Bring modularity to the central schema, providing a simple, efficient, and reliable developer experience at scale.” The Viaduct team is one of the most tenured and experienced teams in the company, setting the best practices and next-gen architecture for Airbnb. We work closely with infrastructure teams (Build Infra, Service Platform, CI/CD, Reliability, Observability, Developer Experience to name a few) as well as product engineers.

The Difference You Will Make:

The Viaduct team has embarked on a mission to upgrade today’s solution with a new version of the system called “Viaduct Modern”. This modern system is built on a new architecture that allows for future improvements and gains in the form of tenant developer experience, cost performance and team autonomy. You will join the team on this journey in both the creation of the new system as well as the migration of tenants away from today’s solution. You will work on various parts of the system including the engine, the API, observability and monitoring and schema modeling.

A Typical Day:

• Coding in high-impact, deep complexity domains, owning projects end-to-end
• Driving partnerships with tenant product teams to inform the tooling roadmap
• Frequently working in vaguely scoped areas, responsible for defining project requirements for improving reliability and performance, through Viaduct framework changes and tenant-centric observability
• Developing technical expertise in various areas of the Viaduct framework as well as with product teams’ use cases and requests
• Collaborating with a few experienced teammates to enable Viaduct tenant engineers to be autonomous in identifying and resolving performance and cost inefficiencies within their code written in the Viaduct platform
• Supporting the customer base of Viaduct developers

Your Expertise:

• 5+ years of work experience in a relevant engineering role
• Proficiency and interest working cross-team with both product and infrastructure engineers
• Experience operating critical online backend services
• Comfort shipping high visibility, complex coding projects
• Strong preference: expertise with GraphQL and Kotlin

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.

Pay Range$185,000—$223,000 USD