Staff Backend Engineer

Summary

Join Airbnb's Media Foundation team as a Staff Backend Software Engineer and play a key role in designing, building, and optimizing the next-generation media infrastructure. Lead technical initiatives, drive architectural decisions, and collaborate with cross-functional teams to enhance Airbnb’s media capabilities. Work on complex, large-scale distributed systems processing and serving billions of media assets. A typical day involves designing and implementing scalable backend services, leading architectural decisions, collaborating with various teams, and mentoring engineers. This role requires significant software development experience, expertise in media systems, and strong programming skills. The position offers a competitive salary, bonus, equity, benefits, and Employee Travel Credits and is US-Remote Eligible.

Requirements

• 9+ years of software development experience in a fast paced tech environment with a minimum of 3 years working with media systems
• Strong programming (Java, Kotlin or equivalent) skills for hands-on IC work
• You have excellent communication skills and the ability to work well within a team and with teams across the engineering, product & design organizations
• Experience working with image processing or content video transcoding
• Experience AI/ML-based media processing
• Knowledge of content moderation, media compliance, and rights management
• Passion to level-up those around you through curiosity and fostering a collaborative and inclusive team environment

Responsibilities

• Design and implement scalable, high-performance backend services for media processing, storage, and delivery
• Lead architectural decisions and drive technical excellence in media infrastructure participating in regular on-call & improving team’s operational rigor
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams both internal including frontend, mobile, and infrastructure engineers as well as vendors, to enhance media-related experiences
• Mentor and guide engineers, fostering a culture of technical excellence and innovation
• You will ideate and prototype solutions that address concerns that are unique to the Airbnb Media hosting and media processing

Benefits

• Bonus
• Equity
• Benefits
• Employee Travel Credits