Senior Software Engineer, Infrastructure

The Community You Will Join:

Airbnb is a mission-driven company dedicated to helping create a world where anyone can belong anywhere. It takes a unified team committed to our core values to achieve this goal. Airbnb's various functions embody the company's innovative spirit and our fast-moving team is committed to leading as a 21st century company.

The Networking team within Airbnb’s Cloud Infrastructure org owns the entire Airbnb production network infrastructure. The group is responsible for designing, building and operating the software and solutions that connect all Airbnb users and services, such as traffic proxy and load balancer, service mesh, VPC/backbone and cross-region connectivity, network monitoring and security systems. With users around the world, reliability, scalability, efficiency and high availability are our team’s core concerns.

The Difference You Will Make:

As a member of the network infra team, you will be working with talented engineers on cutting edge technologies of cloud native network stack from Layer3 - Layer7. You will contribute to the key infrastructure components that connect all Airbnb users and services across the globe. You will have the chance to define and influence large infrastructure initiatives such as global traffic load balancing and disaster recovery, next-gen service mesh, cross-region gateways and edge security etc.

Airbnb is a member of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) end user community, and we work closely with the open source community (e.g. k8s, istio) and peer companies to tackle cloud native engineering challenges at scale. You will also have the chance to make an impact on the industry and open source communities.

A Typical Day:

• Work with open source communities (e.g. istio) to build the next generation service mesh for all Airbnb back-end services;
• Build the cross-region gateways and load balancers for global Airbnb services;
• Work with external partners and internal engineering and security teams to deliver edge security systems that protect Airbnb services;
• Design the multi-region network architecture on public clouds, and build software and operation tools to manage Airbnb’s production network;
• Work with product and engineering teams to optimize the network performance for Airbnb services;

Your Expertise:

• Professional fluency in English required
• 5+ years of relevant software development industry experience in a fast paced, high growth tech environment.
• Expertise with virtual network architecture on public cloud providers (e.g. AWS, GCP, Azure) and their network service offerings (e.g., VPC, Security Group, PrivateLink and related products.).
• Experience running large scale networking systems and software (e.g. Edge proxies, DNS, CDN, network gateways), experience working with istio, Envoy is a plus.
• You are a full-cycle developer: strong ownership and experience building and operating high-scale, distributed systems across the full software life cycle.
• You have excellent communication skills and the ability to work well within a team and with teams across the engineering teams.
• You are a strong problem solver and have led a team that is on-call for production infrastructure before.
• You are passionate about efficiency, availability, technical quality and system quality.

Airbnb Cloud Infrastructure in the Media:

• Zero-downtime Istio upgrades across thousands of pods/VMs – InfoQ coverage - 2025
• KubeCon+CloudNativeCon 2024, Secure Outgoing Traffic: Building a powerful Internet Egress Gateway for Reliable connectivity, Edie Yang, Akshita Agarwal.
• KubeCon+CloudNativeCon 2024, DNS deep dive in k8s with CoreDNS, Jingming Guo
• The Airbnb Tech Blog 2023, Improving Istio Propagation Delay, Ying Zhu
• KubeCon+CloudNativeCon 2022, Whose packet is it anyway? Life of a packet through service mesh, Kevin Leimkuhler, Doug Jordan.
• Building simplified service mesh API for developers -2022
• KubeCon+CloudNativeCon 2021, Building a multi-cluster/env service mesh at Airbnb. Weibo He, Stephan Chan.
• 10 More Weird Ways to Blow Up Your Kubernetes -2021
• Airbnb on Istio - 2021
• Airbnb Service Discovery: Past, Present, Future (Challenges of Change) - 2020
• Developing Kubernetes Services at Airbnb Scale - 2019
• 10 Weird Ways to Blow Up Your Kubernetes - 2020
• Did Kubernetes Make My p95s Worse? - 2020
• Scaling Kubernetes to Thousands of Nodes Across Multiple Clusters, Calmly - 2020

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.