Senior Software Engineer, Dev Tools

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: Dev Tools’ mission is to help Airbnb engineers and AI agents build, validate, review, and ship high-quality software quickly, reliably, and safely.

AI-assisted development is rapidly increasing the speed, volume, and concurrency of software delivery. Our team is building the infrastructure needed to support that growth - from cloud development environments and agent execution platforms to source control, code review, validation, and polyglot monorepo tooling. The Difference You Will Make: As a senior engineer on Dev Tools, you will design, build, and operate foundational systems used across Airbnb engineering.

You will work on technically challenging infrastructure problems involving distributed systems, Kubernetes, developer workflows, scalability, reliability, and cost efficiency, while partnering closely with teams across Developer Platform, DevAI, CI/CD, Cloud Infrastructure, and Security. You won't just build - you'll shape the technical direction and set the bar for craft on a small, high-impact team. High leverage: Every improvement you make is felt by every engineer at Airbnb — plus the AI agents running on behalf of those engineers.

Greenfield platform work: The async agent execution platform is nascent. You'll be making foundational decisions about how it scales, not inheriting someone else's choices. Clear business stakes: Our cloud workspace costs nearly doubled in Q1 as agentic usage surged.

The tradeoff between developer productivity and infrastructure spend is real, visible, and yours to influence. Small team, big scope: This is not a large-org role where your contribution gets diffused. The team is intentionally lean - your work ships and your decisions matter.

A Typical Day: Build and operate cloud development environments and execution platforms for engineers and AI agents. Scale Kubernetes-based worker pools, control planes, and APIs for parallel and asynchronous workloads. Improve AirDev validation so engineers and agents can test changes quickly before CI.

Strengthen source-control and code-review systems as PR volume, automation, and concurrency grow. Improve developer workflows across build, test, dependency management, and polyglot monorepo tooling. Diagnose production issues across distributed systems, networking, storage, and orchestration Setting technical direction and making high-stakes architectural decisions with significant ambiguity Mentoring engineers on the team and raising the quality bar through code review and design feedback Your Expertise: 5-9+ years of industry experience (and/or relevant academic experience) Bachelor’s and/or Master’s degree, preferably in CS, or equivalent experience Experience leading and shipping large scope technical projects in collaboration with multiple experienced engineers.

You are a full-cycle developer: strong ownership and experience building and operating high-scale, distributed systems across the full software life cycle. Familiarity with container and orchestration technologies such as Docker and Kubernetes. You have excellent communication skills - you can explain complex infrastructure tradeoffs to engineers at all levels and drive cross-team alignment without formal authority You are a strong problem solver and have solid debugging skills.

You are passionate about developer productivity and making developer lives better. Cloud infrastructure and Kubernetes: You've built systems that run reliably at scale on AWS. You know EKS, EC2, EBS, and cloud networking (VPCs, load balancers, VPN tunneling) and have opinions on when each approach is right.