Strategic Overview
Senior Software Engineer, Streaming Infrastructure at Airbnb is a dev opportunity centered on the specialist responsibilities and outcomes described in the employer's listing.
The published role emphasizes work such as Design, build, and operate large-scale CDC and batch export systems that run across every online database at Airbnb. Improve the reliability, performance, and efficiency of systems that critical business functions depend on.
The role is listed for United States with remote working arrangement, giving candidates the practical context needed to assess fit before applying.
Key information at a glance
About This Role
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.
Airbnb's Data Infrastructure organization builds the systems that store, move, and transform data across the company. Our Data Movement & Transformation (DMT) group is building a single, unified platform for moving data between Airbnb's storage systems, replacing dozens of one-off tools with one reliable, well-supported way to get data where it needs to go. This platform is the foundation for Data as a Service, a…
The Community You Will Join:
Key Responsibilities & Objectives
- Design, build, and operate large-scale CDC and batch export systems that run across every online database at Airbnb.
- Improve the reliability, performance, and efficiency of systems that critical business functions depend on.
- Take part in on-call and raise the operational bar for a platform that other teams build on.
- Experience maintaining, analyzing, and debugging production systems at scale.
Required Qualifications & Candidate Blueprint
- Be hands-on (code, design, test) and work with partner teams, internal customers, and leadership to deliver multi-month projects on time.
- 5+ years of experience building and operating large-scale backend distributed systems, such as data ingestion, streaming, CDC, storage, or data platforms.
- Hands-on experience with streaming systems like Kafka, and with how databases capture and publish changes (binlogs, Debezium, or similar).
Salary & Benefits
Published compensation: $196,000 – $230,000 USD
Salary Benchmark
This role’s published compensation is compared with current employer-disclosed salary ranges for the same role at the Senior level in the same currency.
Benchmark uses active employer job postings in our database and excludes this listing. It is not a third-party salary estimate, and currencies are not converted.
Full Job Description
The following is the complete job description supplied by the source. We sanitize unsafe markup and remove external links, but do not shorten or rewrite the employer's source content.
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.
Airbnb's Data Infrastructure organization builds the systems that store, move, and transform data across the company. Our Data Movement & Transformation (DMT) group is building a single, unified platform for moving data between Airbnb's storage systems, replacing dozens of one-off tools with one reliable, well-supported way to get data where it needs to go. This platform is the foundation for Data as a Service, a top-level infrastructure initiative at Airbnb.
The Community You Will Join:
The Ingestion team is the front door to DMT. We build and operate two managed, multi-tenant platforms that move data out of Airbnb's online databases for offline processing:
- SpinalTap: near real-time change data capture (CDC) streaming to Kafka for every Aurora and UDS table at Airbnb.
- DBExports: periodic full-table snapshots and mutation exports.
Teams across Airbnb depend on these systems, including payments, fraud detection, financial reporting, search, messaging, notifications, and machine learning. Reliability, performance, and scale are the product. You'll work closely with DMT's other teams, which own real-time streaming infrastructure, pipeline orchestration, and schema management, and you'll have the chance to work across the broader platform
The Difference You Will Make:
- Be hands-on (code, design, test) and work with partner teams, internal customers, and leadership to deliver multi-month projects on time.
- Design, build, and operate large-scale CDC and batch export systems that run across every online database at Airbnb.
- Help shape the architecture of DMT's unified data movement platform while it's being built.
- Improve the reliability, performance, and efficiency of systems that critical business functions depend on.
- Make it easier for engineers at Airbnb to get their data into offline systems without needing to be database or pipeline experts.
- Take part in on-call and raise the operational bar for a platform that other teams build on.
Your Expertise:
- 5+ years of experience building and operating large-scale backend distributed systems, such as data ingestion, streaming, CDC, storage, or data platforms.
- Hands-on experience with streaming systems like Kafka, and with how databases capture and publish changes (binlogs, Debezium, or similar).
- Ability to own and go deep in a complex codebase.
- Experience maintaining, analyzing, and debugging production systems at scale.
- Clean, readable, testable, and maintainable code.
- Strong collaboration and communication skills in a remote-working environment.
- Strong ownership and a track record of delivering on time.
Nice to Have:
- Experience building managed or multi-tenant platforms used by other engineering teams.
- Familiarity with MySQL/Aurora, schema evolution, or large-scale batch data processing.
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: reasonableaccommodations@airbnb.com. 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.
How We'll Take Care of You:
Our job titles may span more than one career level. The actual base pay is dependent upon many factors, such as: training, transferable skills, work experience, business needs and market demands. The base pay range is subject to change and may be modified in the future. This role may also be eligible for bonus, equity, benefits, and Employee Travel Credits.
Reasonable Accommodations: We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations throughout the recruitment process for applicants with disabilities. If you need assistance, or an accommodation, please let your recruiter know once you are contacted about a role.
A Note on Recruiting Scams: Scammers sometimes pose as Airbnb recruiters to get money or personal information from candidates. A few things that will always be true for Airbnb’s hiring process: our open roles are posted on Airbnb’s Career’s Page at careers.airbnb.com, and our recruiters correspond only from @airbnb.com or @ext.airbnb.com email addresses. Our recruiters will never ask for your Social Security number, bank account details, passport, or payment app information while you are interviewing. We’ll also never ask you to pay a fee, send money, deposit or cash a check, or purchase work-related equipment (such as a company laptop) during the interview process. We encourage candidates to remain vigilant of these recruiting scams and not share sensitive information if you do not believe an individual is actually affiliated with Airbnb.
Editor’s Market Perspective (Our Custom Analysis)
Why This Position Matters
This dev opening is a useful opportunity for candidates whose experience matches the role-specific capabilities named in the listing. Its strongest career signal is the scope of the work itself — particularly Design, build, and operate large-scale CDC and batch export systems that run across every online database at Airbnb. — rather than a generic title alone.
Resume & Application Strategy
For the application, mirror the employer's language where it truthfully matches your background: foreground the role-specific capabilities named in the listing, quantify outcomes from comparable work, and place the most relevant experience near the top of the resume. If the listing specifies tools, platforms, leadership scope, or domain experience, use those exact terms in context instead of presenting an unrelated keyword list.
We organize source-provided information into this independent job-seeker overview. Compensation is shown only when the source provides it; the official listing remains the authority for current requirements and application instructions.