Principal Software Engineer, Performance at Airbnb. Leads the infrastructure performance strategy across CPU, GPU, and backend systems at scale. Defines performance objectives, builds profiling tooling, and influences company-wide engineering practices.
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.
Airbnb's infrastructure is scaling fast in the AI era: more compute, more GPU spend, more complexity across the stack. The Infrastructure Performance team exists to make sure that growth doesn't come at the cost of speed, reliability, or efficiency. We treat performance as a first-class engineering property - measurable, continuously improving, and enforced across the software lifecycle.
This is the most senior performance engineering role at the company. In this role, you won't be handed a roadmap. You'll build one.
The Performance team owns performance across the full stack: CPU and GPU fleet utilization, backend service efficiency, end-to-end request latency, storage, ML infrastructure, and observability. That means instrumenting and profiling at scale, discovering hot paths, shaping how teams across the company think about performance SLOs, and influencing build vs. buy decisions on emerging hardware and software.
The team also builds the tooling that lets every backend team self-serve performance insights, scaling good decisions beyond your direct involvement.
On the product side, as the TL for Performance team, you will partner with engineering teams to tie infrastructure performance directly to user experience and business outcomes. When a host's listing loads faster or a guest's search returns cleaner results, some of that is the win enabled by the Performance team.
Why this role is unusual
Most performance engineering roles are reactive: triage a regression, close the ticket. This one is different. You'll be setting the strategy, defining what "good" looks like, and building systems that make performance a default property of how Airbnb ships software. That requires someone who can operate at both the systems level and the organizational one.
If you've been waiting for the chance to shape how an entire company thinks about performance, this is it.
Responsibilities
What you'll do:
About you:
Your Location:
This position is US - Remote Eligible. The role may include occasional work at an Airbnb office or attendance at offsites, as agreed to with your manager. While the position is Remote Eligible, you must live in a state where Airbnb, Inc. has a registered entity. Click here for the up-to-date list of excluded states. This list is continuously evolving, so please check back with us if the state you live in is on the exclusion list . If your position is employed by another Airbnb entity, your recruiter will inform you what states you are eligible to work from.
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.
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.