Senior Software Engineer, Streaming Infrastructure

Airbnb's Data Infrastructure organization builds the systems that store, move, and transform data across the company. Our Data Movement & Transformation (DMT) group is building a single, unified platform for moving data between Airbnb's storage systems, replacing dozens of one-off tools with one reliable, well-supported way to get data where it needs to go. This platform is the foundation for Data as a Service, a top-level infrastructure initiative at Airbnb.

The Community You Will Join:

The Ingestion team is the front door to DMT. We build and operate two managed, multi-tenant platforms that move data out of Airbnb's online databases for offline processing:

• SpinalTap: near real-time change data capture (CDC) streaming to Kafka for every Aurora and UDS table at Airbnb.
• DBExports: periodic full-table snapshots and mutation exports.

Teams across Airbnb depend on these systems, including payments, fraud detection, financial reporting, search, messaging, notifications, and machine learning. Reliability, performance, and scale are the product. You'll work closely with DMT's other teams, which own real-time streaming infrastructure, pipeline orchestration, and schema management, and you'll have the chance to work across the broader platform

The Difference You Will Make:

• Be hands-on (code, design, test) and work with partner teams, internal customers, and leadership to deliver multi-month projects on time.
• Design, build, and operate large-scale CDC and batch export systems that run across every online database at Airbnb.
• Help shape the architecture of DMT's unified data movement platform while it's being built.
• Improve the reliability, performance, and efficiency of systems that critical business functions depend on.
• Make it easier for engineers at Airbnb to get their data into offline systems without needing to be database or pipeline experts.
• Take part in on-call and raise the operational bar for a platform that other teams build on.

Your Expertise:

• 5+ years of experience building and operating large-scale backend distributed systems, such as data ingestion, streaming, CDC, storage, or data platforms.
• Hands-on experience with streaming systems like Kafka, and with how databases capture and publish changes (binlogs, Debezium, or similar).
• Ability to own and go deep in a complex codebase.
• Experience maintaining, analyzing, and debugging production systems at scale.
• Clean, readable, testable, and maintainable code.
• Strong collaboration and communication skills in a remote-working environment.
• Strong ownership and a track record of delivering on time.

Nice to Have:

• Experience building managed or multi-tenant platforms used by other engineering teams.
• Familiarity with MySQL/Aurora, schema evolution, or large-scale batch data processing.

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

$196,000—$230,000 USD

We’ll also never ask you to pay a fee, send money, deposit or cash a check, or purchase work-related equipment (such as a company laptop) during the interview process. We encourage candidates to remain vigilant of these recruiting scams and not share sensitive information if you do not believe an individual is actually affiliated with Airbnb.