Staff Software Engineer

Summary

Join Airbnb's Transactional Storage Services team as a Staff engineer and contribute to the design, building, and operation of a new, open-source NewSql database. You will work with a talented team on a modern distributed database system, tackling broad and deep technical challenges related to query and server performance, data capture, and operational efficiency. Responsibilities include proposing and implementing database enhancements, investigating operational issues, designing operational frameworks, and delivering a zero-downtime replication pipeline. You will also mentor junior team members and participate in on-call rotations. This role offers the opportunity to influence the company's long-term data strategy and work on a cutting-edge system.

Requirements

• 9+ years of relevant industry experience
• Hands-on experience in building and operating distributed NoSQL or NewSQL databases and services
• Solid understanding of distributed 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

• Read and comprehend existing open-source code to understand the system's functionality and architecture, especially around query compilation and performance, as well as change data capture
• 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, and influence the company’s long-term roadmap and strategy
• Investigating issues of a modern, distributed database running at scale, spanning storage, query, routing layers
• Apply inspection/debugging techniques to metrics/telemetry, logs, events, and other information sources to diagnose operational issues, and participate in incident response activities, document and present incident postmortems
• Design frameworks and maintain the general ecosystem around our NewSql database’s monitoring, permissions, service discovery integration, etc
• Design, automate critical database operations such as centralized and hierarchical config management system, fully automated image building and release certification for major version upgrades, zero-downtime Blue/Green deployment
• Be part of the team that defines and delivers a generalized database platform for partner KVStore, ORM, MySql teams
• Deliver a zero-downtime forward and reverse replication pipeline with near-real-time consistency between two transactional databases, with correctness guarantee across transactional boundaries
• Deliver a robust failover/failback mechanism to guarantee correctness and continuity during unexpected outages
• Participate in regular on-calls and improve the 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

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in Java, Go, Rust or C++
• Experience with writing robust automation frameworks and tooling
• Experience with Kubernetes, operator pattern, helm, etc; experience with Infrastructure as Code, such as Chef and Terraform
• Experience with database schema design and query performance profiling

Benefits

• Bonus
• Equity
• Benefits
• Employee Travel Credits