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 infrastructure is scaling fast in the AI era: more compute, more GPU spend, more complexity across the stack. The

Infrastructure Performance team exists to make sure that growth doesn't come at the cost of speed, reliability, or efficiency. We

treat performance as a first-class engineering property - measurable, continuously improving, and enforced across the software

lifecycle.

This is the most senior performance engineering role at the company. In this role, you won't be handed a roadmap. You'll build

one.

The Performance team owns performance across the full stack: CPU and GPU fleet utilization, backend service efficiency, end-to-end

request latency, storage, ML infrastructure, and observability. That means instrumenting and profiling at scale, discovering hot

paths, shaping how teams across the company think about performance SLOs, and influencing build vs. buy decisions on emerging

hardware and software.

The team also builds the tooling that lets every backend team self-serve performance insights, scaling good decisions beyond your

direct involvement.

On the product side, as the TL for Performance team, you will partner with engineering teams to tie infrastructure performance

directly to user experience and business outcomes. When a host's listing loads faster or a guest's search returns cleaner results,

some of that is the win enabled by the Performance team.

Why this role is unusual

Most performance engineering roles are reactive: triage a regression, close the ticket. This one is different. You'll be setting

the strategy, defining what "good" looks like, and building systems that make performance a default property of how Airbnb ships

software. That requires someone who can operate at both the systems level and the organizational one.

If you've been waiting for the chance to shape how an entire company thinks about performance, this is it.

Responsibilities

What you'll do:

Define and drive Airbnb's long-term performance strategy, spanning product performance, infrastructure efficiency, and business

objectives for scale and growth

Lead the architecture and development of performance profiling and instrumentation infrastructure, covering CPU, GPU, memory,

request hot paths, utilization, and deployment events, making these capabilities available to all backend teams

Partner with infrastructure teams across compute, reliability, backend frameworks, and AI Infra to ensure the fleet operates at

optimal utilization

Connect performance outcomes to business objectives and company-wide SLOs, and guide engineering teams in keeping the stack

scalable and efficient

Evaluate emerging hardware and software technologies, engage with the external solutions ecosystem, and advise on build vs. buy

decisions in areas of strategic importance

Mentor and technically uplevel engineers across the organization through design reviews, architectural guidance, and

performance best practices

About you:

12+ years of performance engineering experience in high-scale, high-growth production environments
Deep understanding of how software and hardware systems interact at scale, including architectural patterns for

performance-critical stacks. You know the difference between a bad algorithm and a bad cache eviction policy, and you're

comfortable in the kernel, in the JVM, and in a post-mortem

Strong familiarity with public cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and container orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes)
Experience with profiling and instrumentation tooling across CPU, GPU, memory, and distributed request tracing
Demonstrated ability to define performance objectives and drive delivery against company-wide SLOs across multiple

organizations.

You know how to move organizations, not just codebases: you've influenced teams that don't report to you, made the case for

long-term investments over short-term fixes, and mentored engineers who went on to do exceptional work

Strong communication and influence skills; comfortable driving technical direction with senior engineering and product

leadership

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: 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.

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.

Pay Range

$292,000—$365,000 USD

Role

Principal Software Engineer, Performance

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Infrastructure