Senior Software Engineer, Storage

Airbnb was born in 2007 when two hosts welcomed three guests to their San Francisco home, and has since grown to over 5 million hosts who have welcomed over 2 billion guest arrivals in almost every country across the globe. Every day, hosts offer unique stays and experiences that make it possible for guests to connect with communities in a more authentic way.

The Community You Will Join

The Online Data organization helps Airbnb's builders create real-time data experiences through intuitive data interfaces and tools, with no database expertise required. Within Online Data, the Transactional Storage Services team owns the core storage infrastructure behind Airbnb's online data systems.

We design, build, and operate a new source-of-truth, horizontally scalable, open-source NewSQL database running on stateful Kubernetes. It holds Airbnb's critical user, listing, and financial data.

You'll join the Database Kernel team, which owns performance, reliability, and stability for Airbnb's NewSQL engine at scale. The team's work centers on the storage layer and query execution engine, and also covers consensus and shard management. In this role you'll dig into database internals to diagnose and fix SQL latency and availability issues. You'll also work closely with our open-source database vendor on root cause analysis and upstream contributions.

Examples of the Difference You'll Make

• Dig into the query and storage layers to explain latency differences between B-tree and LSM-based storage engines.


• Analyze query plans and execution paths (planning, optimization, operators, and distributed execution) to find and fix sources of SQL latency.


• Tune storage engine behavior (compaction, caching, and I/O) for Airbnb's workloads.


• Design and implement traffic prioritization at the storage layer for connection pooling.


• Drive root cause analysis on high-severity incidents with our open-source vendor, and land fixes upstream.

Your Expertise

• 5+ years of software engineering, including significant hands-on work on a database storage layer or query execution engine.


• Strong SQL skills, plus an understanding of how queries are planned, optimized, and executed at the engine level.


• Deep understanding of storage engine internals (e.g., B-tree/LSM, compaction, indexing, I/O) and/or query processing (e.g., planning, optimization, execution operators).


• Experience with distributed databases (replication, consensus, transactions) is a strong plus, and familiarity with NewSQL systems like TiDB is a bonus.


• Ability to own and dive deeply into a complex database codebase, ideally an open-source one. Upstream contributions are a plus.


• Experience analyzing and debugging high-severity production incidents, especially performance and latency problems.


• Writes clean, testable, maintainable code.


• Strong collaboration and communication skills in a remote working environment.


• Strong ownership and a consistent track record of delivery.

Our Commitment To Inclusion & Belonging:

Airbnb is committed to working with the broadest talent pool possible. We believe diverse ideas foster innovation and engagement, and allow us to attract creatively-led people, and to develop the best products, services and solutions. All qualified individuals are encouraged to apply.

We strive to also provide a disability inclusive application and interview process. If you are a candidate with a disability and require reasonable accommodation in order to submit an application, please contact us at: [email protected]. Please include your full name, the role you’re applying for and the accommodation necessary to assist you with the recruiting process. 

We ask that you only reach out to us if you are a candidate whose disability prevents you from being able to complete our online application.

Equal Employment Opportunity:

Airbnb values diversity & belonging and is proud to be an Equal Employment Opportunity employer. All individuals seeking employment at Airbnb are considered without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, age, gender, sex, marital status, ancestry, physical or mental disability, veteran status, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, or any other legally protected characteristic.