Staff Software Engineer – Tech Foundations

Airbnb

. Set the technical direction for a major area of Airbnb's Observability platform and lead it from design through production .

Posted 11/2/2026full-timeRemote • United StatesLead💰 $212,000 - $265,000 per yearWebsite

Core Competencies

Role fit

Core Competencies

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Demonstrates extensive experience in building and operating large-scale distributed systems, with a strong focus on telemetry domains such as metrics, logs, and distributed tracing. Proficient in leading technical direction and mentoring teams while ensuring operational readiness and effective communication with engineering leadership.

Highest-signal resume keywords

Distributed Systems DesignTelemetry Domain ExpertiseGo ProgrammingKubernetes ExperienceAWS Proficiency

ATS Keywords

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Applicant Tracking System Keywords

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Hard Skills

Distributed SystemsTelemetryGoJavaKotlinOpenTelemetryOpenSearchAnomaly DetectionRate LimitingCaching

Soft Skills

Clear CommunicationMentoringDesign Review

Tools & Technologies

Grafana MimirVmagentKubernetesAWSIstioEnvoy

Industry Keywords

ObservabilityMetrics PipelineLog AggregationSelf-Service VisibilityCost Control

Tech Stack

Tools & technologies

AWSDistributed SystemsGrafanaJavaKotlinKubernetesOpen SourceGo

About the role

Key responsibilities & impact

Set the technical direction for a major area of Airbnb's Observability platform and lead it from design through production
Scale the metrics pipeline using OpenTelemetry, vmagent, and Grafana Mimir while controlling costs through aggregation, sampling, and blocking unused metrics
Replace legacy log aggregation with an OpenTelemetry-based pipeline and evolve log and trace storage on OpenSearch
Build a fast, reliable query layer for engineers and AI agents with rate limiting, access control, isolation, and caching
Provide teams with self-service visibility and control over telemetry costs, including unit costs and controls for granularity, sampling, and retention
Improve time to detect through anomaly detection and automated correlation across signals
Lead distributed-systems design and delivery from prototype to production operation
Write tested, readable, maintainable code and contribute to upstream open-source projects
Align roadmaps across Observability and partner infrastructure and product teams
Drive build, buy, and open-source decisions
Explain reliability, cost, and developer-productivity tradeoffs and return on investment to engineering leadership
Mentor engineers and improve design reviews, operational readiness, and on-call practices
Help Airbnb engineers instrument services and self-serve when debugging production issues

Requirements

What you’ll need

9+ years of industry experience
Track record of building and operating large-scale distributed systems in production
Experience leading the technical direction of a system or multi-team project end to end
Deep experience in at least one telemetry domain at scale: metrics, logs, or distributed tracing
Strong coding skills in Go or Java/Kotlin
Comfortable working in unfamiliar codebases, including upstream open source
Experience with Kubernetes, AWS, and service mesh technologies such as Istio and Envoy
Clear written and verbal communication, including design documents and tradeoff analysis for engineering leadership
Must live in a state where Airbnb, Inc. has a registered entity

Benefits

Comp & perks

Bonus eligibility
Equity eligibility
Benefits eligibility
Employee Travel Credits
Remote-eligible work arrangement
Occasional work at an Airbnb office or attendance at offsites, as agreed with the manager
Disability accommodations throughout the recruitment process