Staff Software Engineer (Technical Lead), Storage

📋 Description

• • As a Staff Software Engineer (Technical Lead) focused on Storage at Airbnb, you will be at the forefront of architecting, developing, and scaling the critical distributed systems that power our global platform. You will join the Online Data organization, specifically the KV Stores & Caching team, which is instrumental in ensuring Airbnb customers experience delight through real-time data. This team empowers Airbnb's builders by providing intuitive data interfaces and tools, abstracting away the complexities of database expertise.
• • Your role as a Technical Lead will be pivotal in driving the technical vision and execution for our robust KV stores and caching infrastructure. You will not only shape architectural decisions but also mentor and grow a team of talented engineers, guiding them to deliver high-impact solutions that are foundational to Airbnb's operations.
• • You will be responsible for a highly available, low-latency, distributed, multi-tenant KV store that serves millions of read QPS and maintains 99.9+% availability. This platform is a cornerstone for critical services like user profiling, Search, ML, and pricing teams, supporting thousands of customer tables.
• • Furthermore, you will oversee a suite of control planes and clients managing hundreds of ElasticCache clusters across Airbnb's production environment, handling millions of IOPS and millions of indexing QPS.
• • You will also lead the development and maintenance of a scalable, reliable, and performant distributed coordination service that underpins many mission-critical systems, including MySQL, Redis, Kafka, Flink, Druid, and Zookeeper.
• • A significant part of your role will involve defining the multi-year technical roadmap for caching and KV infrastructure at Airbnb, ensuring our systems evolve to meet future demands and opportunities.
• • You will guide the evolution of our KV store, transitioning it from supporting derived-data workloads to becoming a system-of-record, thereby expanding its capabilities and broadening its user base across the company.
• • A key initiative will be the development of a robust, multi-tenant caching solution designed to serve the diverse needs of Airbnb's various product teams.
• • You will lead the rearchitecture of our KV write path, aiming to simplify infrastructure complexity while simultaneously improving replication lag and enhancing overall system performance.
• • You will also be responsible for overseeing the frameworks that enable high-traffic, zero-downtime migrations between critical data platforms, ensuring seamless transitions and minimal disruption.
• • This role demands deep expertise in distributed systems, multi-tenant storage, and infrastructure. You will leverage your proven track record of architecting and scaling high-performance, business-critical systems to tackle complex challenges.
• • Collaboration and influence will be key, as you will work across various teams and organizations to build alignment on technical strategy and drive consensus on architectural decisions.
• • Your strong judgment on technical trade-offs will be essential in making decisions that effectively balance short-term delivery needs with long-term system maintainability and scalability.
• • You will also play a crucial role in onboarding new engineers to our broad and complex codebase, and in enabling the entire team to navigate and contribute effectively.
• • This is an opportunity to make a significant impact on the core infrastructure of a globally recognized company, shaping the future of data storage and caching at Airbnb and influencing the experiences of millions of users worldwide.