Senior Staff Engineer, Performance

The Community You Will Join:

The Infrastructure Performance team's charter is to optimize performance across the fleet and throughout the backend stack. The scope of infrastructure systems the Performance Team work on includes: K8s services, Observability infra, Data pipelines, ML infrastructure etc. each requiring different skills.

The Difference You Will Make:

In areas of strategic importance, the team engages deeply and effectively with their cross-functional partners to analyze, scope and deliver performance improvement. They achieve this by building and maintaining strong cross-team relationships grounded in sound technical judgement and deep technical engagement. The team is also responsible for the evaluation of the latest hardware offerings from across the industry to get the most optimal performance and minimize the footprint of the fleet. The team is also responsible for evaluating the performance of the latest JVM with respect to hardware configurations and OS features. Finally the team also owns key pieces of Performance Infrastructure in performance observability in resources(cpu, memory, locks, etc) in our services and make this data available to all backend teams across the tech organization. You will closely work with a group of accomplished engineers and report to the Senior Engineering Manager, Infrastructure.

A Typical Day: 

• Work closely with cost and performance cross-functional partners and engineers across all teams at Airbnb to optimize the performance and the operating cost of our infrastructure.


• Work with our largest services to optimize their performance through profiling, analysis and tuning.


• Build distributed performance tooling to constantly collect performance data and develop automation to surface performance bottlenecks.


• Lead continuous load testing in production to determine performance bottlenecks and vulnerabilities of airbnb.com.


• Work on production performance issues to minimize latency for our customers.


• Work to modernize Airbnb’s software stack touching every layer.


• Build infrastructure to deploy the latest hardware to our AWS Kubernetes clusters in order to minimize their footprint.

Your Expertise:

• 10+ years of relevant performance optimization industry experience in a fast paced, high growth tech environment.


• A working knowledge of processor vectorization activation for various COTS applications


• Deep software tuning and optimization experience, Java preferred but other major languages such as C++ acceptable.


• Expertise in using metrics to uncover performance issues.


• Familiarity with system hardware as it pertains to performance.


• Familiarity with a public cloud provider (AWS, GCP, Azure) and their infrastructure as a service offering (e.g. EC2).


• Familiarity with container and orchestration technologies such as Docker and Kubernetes.


• You have excellent communication skills and the ability to work well within a team and across engineering teams.


• You are a strong problem solver and have solid performance debugging skills.


• Experience of load testing software either in production or through benchmarking 


• You are passionate about efficiency and performance

Your Location:

This position is US - Remote Eligible. The role may include occasional work at an Airbnb office or attendance at offsites, as agreed to with your manager. While the position is Remote Eligible, you must live in a state where Airbnb, Inc. has a registered entity. Click here for the up-to-date list of excluded states. This list is continuously evolving, so please check back with us if the state you live in is on the exclusion list . If your position is employed by another Airbnb entity, your recruiter will inform you what states you are eligible to work from.

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.