• Own the Feature Discovery phase for new work within your domain. • Produce high-quality Discovery outputs, including specifications, technical assessments, and risk registers that development teams can execute against without follow-up. • Architect scalable, reliable, and maintainable systems that provide a strong foundation for future development. • Drive technical decision-making and maintain the technical health of your domain. • Identify technical debt and create prioritised plans for continuous improvement. • Proactively manage risks and dependencies across features and initiatives. • Translate technical trade-offs and recommendations for Product, Design, and other non-technical stakeholders. • Ensure teams consistently have well-scoped, well-estimated, development-ready work. • Own technical delivery and Discovery activities within a defined domain. • Mentor Junior and Mid-level Engineers, supporting their growth through structured guidance and feedback. • Participate in hiring activities and evaluate engineering talent against established standards. • Set and maintain standards for AI tool usage within Discovery and development workflows. • Contribute to a culture of engineering excellence, collaboration, and continuous improvement.

• Define and drive the company's technical strategy, architectural principles, and engineering standards. • Own the Opportunity Review process, providing feasibility assessments and architectural guidance for major initiatives before Discovery. • Make platform-level decisions across infrastructure, data, security, integrations, and build-vs-buy evaluations. • Lead and deliver high-impact engineering initiatives, including foundational services, platform architecture, and proof-of-concepts. • Ensure the overall technical health, scalability, and long-term evolution of the platform. • Partner with Product, Sales, Customer Success, and leadership teams to align technical direction with business objectives. • Champion engineering excellence through quality standards, best practices, and continuous improvement. • Define and drive AI strategy across engineering workflows and product capabilities. • Mentor and develop Lead Engineers, helping strengthen technical leadership across the organisation. • Support engineering hiring, talent development, and promotion standards.

• Architect and build full-stack systems spanning modern frontend frameworks (React / TypeScript), distributed backend services (Python, Go, Node.js), cloud-native infrastructure (Azure, AWS, GCP), and API layers (REST, GraphQL, gRPC). • Own end-to-end technical design for platform capabilities including workflow engines, multi-tenant SaaS services, event-driven pipelines, and operator-facing applications. • Identify patentable inventions arising from platform architecture - including novel data flow patterns, system interaction models, and process automation methods - and document them rigorously. • Author invention disclosures, support prior art research, and collaborate with in-house and outside patent counsel through application drafting and prosecution. • Establish and enforce engineering standards: code quality, system observability, security posture, CI/CD practices, and API design conventions across the engineering organization. • Lead cross-functional technical reviews, align with product and data science teams on integration points, and translate business requirements into scalable system designs. • Drive build-vs-buy-vs-partner decisions for platform components; evaluate third-party technologies against long-term IP and architectural strategy. • Deliver systems meeting enterprise SLA requirements: high availability, disaster recovery, role-based access control, audit logging, and regulatory compliance. • Lead the architectural evolution from siloed applications to a decentralized, federated service model - designing unified API gateway and access layers that allow cross-system queries and interoperability without requiring monolithic data consolidation; establish patterns for progressive decomposition of legacy silo systems into composable, independently deployable platform services.

Role Description The Service Tools team’s mission is to enable Airbnb backend developers to develop, test, and maintain their code quickly and reliably. This team is responsible for the standard development lifecycle for service owners—everything from AI Integration for service development, to how integration tests work, to building services for deployment. This represents Airbnb’s largest cohort of developers, you will ultimately be responsible for their productivity. As an engineer on Service Tools, you will work on technologies that help shape an industry-leading end to end developer experience for backend developers. In this role you will be: - Building our next-gen build system using the latest technologies (e.g., Bazel). - Working on integrations between the build system and CI/CD tooling (e.g., merge queues, code coverage, integration testing). - Improving the editor (e.g., IntelliJ) experience for all backend developers. - Helping to shape the technical strategy that directly moves our core metrics (Developer Experience, Developer Velocity, Debuggability, Resilience and Reliability) while reducing cost. - Partnering with engineering leaders across all Airbnb teams for adoption of the new capabilities. Your customers will be all engineers at Airbnb. - A player/coach of our high-performance team to ensure code quality, commitment to craft and operational excellence. Qualifications - FLUENT IN ENGLISH (PROFESSIONAL LEVEL) - 6+ years industry experience. - Bachelor’s and/or Master’s degree, preferably in CS, or equivalent experience. - Proficiency in one or more back-end server languages (Java/Ruby/Go/C++/etc.). - Experienced in architectural patterns of high-scale distributed products/services, such as well-designed APIs, data pipelines and efficient algorithms. - Experience or desire to work collaboratively in cross-functional teams with design, product and data science partners. - Experience working directly on build systems, and even better if you have hands-on experience with Bazel. - Experience working with large monorepos. - Extensive JVM experience. - Want to tackle projects with large open-ended scope and drive significant business impact. - Love collaborating via product reviews, code reviews and architecture discussions. - Are motivated to improve their teammates’ productivity. - Are excited to join an impactful infrastructure team. 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.