Staff Software Engineer

Summary

Join Airbnb's Transactional Storage Services team as a Staff or Senior Staff-level Software Engineer and contribute to the design, building, and operation of a new, open-source NewSQL database. You will be responsible for database substrate design, acting as the point of contact for a stateful system on Kubernetes, designing database operations, conducting disaster recovery case studies, collaborating with vendors and open-source communities, enhancing the database system, and mentoring junior team members. This role requires 9+ years of relevant experience, hands-on experience with distributed databases, a solid understanding of systems and infrastructure, expertise with a public cloud provider, and strong collaboration skills. The position is US-Remote Eligible, with occasional office work or offsites. The role offers a competitive salary, bonus, equity, benefits, and Employee Travel Credits.

Requirements

• 9+ years of relevant industry experience
• Hands-on experience in building and operating distributed NoSQL or NewSQL databases and services
• Solid understanding of systems and infrastructure fundamentals
• Experience in deep diving and then owning a complex code base
• Knack for writing clean, readable, testable, maintainable code
• Ability to decompose large-scale distributed systems and figure out monitoring metrics, failure scenarios and debug them in an efficient manner
• Strong collaboration and communication skills in a remote-working environment
• Expertise with a public cloud provider (AWS, GCP, Azure) and their Storage, VM, Networking, Security offerings. E.g. external-dns, route53, ebs etc

Responsibilities

• Database Substrate Design frameworks and maintain the general ecosystem around our NewSQL database’s monitoring, permissions, service discovery integration, etc
• Be the point of contact for a stateful system running on top of Kubernetes infra interfacing with AWS networking and security APIs
• Design, automate, and document database operations; de-noise for the team
• Database Resiliency Conduct case studies of Airbnb’s disaster recovery scenarios, leverage existing open source and/or design software that satisfies Airbnb’s requirements on database backup and restore, cross-region data resiliency, PiTR, etc
• Collaborate with vendor and open source communities to define the correct paved path in this area
• Database Server Read and comprehend existing open-source code to understand the system's functionality and architecture. Propose and implement enhancements to the database system, ensuring performance, scalability and reliability. Contribute code, documentation, and bug fixes back to the open-source community
• Stay up-to-date with the latest developments in database technologies and distributed systems. Experiment with new tools and technologies to improve the database system
• Mentorship and leadership in general Participate in regular on-call and interact with key customers to have insights on pain points and gaps, improve team’s operational rigor
• Coach more junior members of the team and guide them on iterating on designs and solving the right problems, provide insightful design and code review feedback

Benefits

This role may also be eligible for bonus, equity, benefits, and Employee Travel Credits