Staff Software Engineer, Tech Foundations (Observability)

Location: US remote eligible; must live in a state where Airbnb, Inc. has a registered entity. Occasional office work or offsite attendance may be required.

Base pay: $212,000–$265,000 USD per year, with possible bonus, equity, benefits, and Employee Travel Credits.

Company

Airbnb operates a global platform for stays and experiences, serving hosts and guests worldwide.

What you will do

• Set technical direction for major areas of the Observability platform and lead delivery from design through production operation.
• Scale metrics pipelines using OpenTelemetry, vmagent, and Grafana Mimir while controlling aggregation, sampling, and unused-metric costs.
• Replace legacy log aggregation with OpenTelemetry pipelines and evolve log and trace storage on OpenSearch.
• Build reliable query infrastructure for engineers and AI agents with rate limiting, access control, isolation, and caching.
• Develop telemetry cost visibility and controls, including team and service unit costs, granularity, sampling, and retention.
• Lead distributed-systems design, roadmap alignment, operational readiness, mentoring, and improvements to anomaly detection and signal correlation.

Requirements

• 9+ years of industry experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems in production.
• Experience leading the technical direction of a system or multi-team project end to end, including design, stakeholder alignment, delivery, and operation.
• Deep experience at scale in at least one telemetry domain: metrics with Prometheus, Grafana Mimir, or VictoriaMetrics; logs with OpenSearch or Kafka; or distributed tracing with OpenTelemetry, Jaeger, or ClickHouse.
• Strong coding skills in Go or Java/Kotlin and the ability to work in unfamiliar codebases, including upstream open source.
• Experience with cloud-native infrastructure, including Kubernetes, AWS, and service mesh technologies such as Istio or Envoy.
• Clear written and verbal communication, including design documentation and tradeoff analysis for engineering leadership.

Nice to have

• Contributions to OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana Mimir, VictoriaMetrics, OpenSearch, Jaeger, or similar projects.
• Experience with time-series storage internals, high-cardinality data, or query performance.
• Experience with anomaly detection, automated correlation, or SLO-based alerting.
• Experience with telemetry cost attribution or cost optimization at scale.
• Experience building APIs or tools for AI agents consuming operational data, such as MCP servers.
• Experience with columnar analytics stores such as ClickHouse.

Culture & Benefits

• Remote-eligible role with occasional office or offsite attendance agreed with the manager.
• Opportunity to contribute to open-source projects and improve reliability, cost efficiency, and developer productivity.
• Potential eligibility for bonus, equity, benefits, and Employee Travel Credits.
• Inclusive application and interview process with reasonable accommodations available.