Airbnb
Staff Software Engineer, Streaming Infrastructure
$204K–$255K
United States · Staff · Full-time · Posted Mar 11, 2026
- Experience
- 9+ years of software engineering; includes significant experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems.
About the job
Sets technical direction and builds Airbnb’s unified platform for provisioning, managing, and operating data pipelines, schemas, and Kafka-based streaming infrastructure.
What you'll do
- Design the control plane that provisions Kafka topics, registers schemas, and deploys pipelines from declarative definitions.
- Build safe schema management and improve the reliability, scalability, and cost efficiency of streaming infrastructure.
- Lead technical design, incident follow-through, and cross-team adoption of shared platform abstractions.
What they ask for
- Hands-on experience with Kafka or a similar distributed log or messaging system.
- Experience designing schema or data contract systems and compatibility strategies.
- Experience building control planes or platform APIs.
- Experience operating large-scale production systems, including on-call, incident response, and root cause analysis.
Nice to have
- Experience with data platforms, event-driven systems, or streaming infrastructure.
- Familiarity with stream processing (e.g., Flink) or change data capture.
Pay
$204,000 — $255,000 USD (base salary)
Tools
Kafka, Avro, Protobuf, Kubernetes, Flink
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative