Principal Software Engineer, Performance - Careers

Airbnb

Remote

Quick summary

Work type: Remote
Location: Remote
Salary: $292,000–$365,000 / yr
Posted: 1 day ago

Market check

Salary context

Above market

How this pay compares to similar roles

Similar $201k

This role $328k

$116k most similar roles pay here $392k

This role pays more than 98% of similar roles. Most pay $174,037–$227,250 — the shaded band above. At the midpoint, this role pays about $328k versus about $201k for comparable roles.

Based on 240 similar postings.

Employer

About Airbnb

Founded in 2008 and formerly known as AirBed & Breakfast, Inc., Airbnb is a global marketplace connecting travelers with hosts who offer unique accommodations, ranging from private rooms to entire homes. It operates a massive digital platform for booking stays, experiences, and travel services worldwide.

Airbnb currently has 75 open roles on FindRole.

Listed pay typically runs $204,000–$255,000 across 45 roles with salary data.

Most-posted roles

View all roles at Airbnb

At a glance

TL;DR · Principal Software Engineer, Performance - Careers

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As the most senior performance engineer at Airbnb, you will lead the Infrastructure Performance team to ensure that rapid growth does not compromise speed, reliability, or efficiency. Your role involves setting a long-term strategy for performance across CPU and GPU fleet utilization, backend service efficiency, end-to-end request latency, storage, ML infrastructure, and observability. You will build tooling for self-service performance insights, influence hardware and software decisions, and partner with engineering teams to tie infrastructure performance directly to user experience and business outcomes. The ideal candidate has over 12 years of high-scale production environment experience, expertise in profiling and instrumentation tools, and the ability to define and drive company-wide SLOs while mentoring engineers across the organization.

Skills

AWS Kubernetes Docker CI/CD GCP Azure Python PostgreSQL Prometheus Grafana Terraform GitLab Linux JVM Distributed tracing Performance profiling Instrumentation tooling Cloud infrastructure Container orchestration

What you'll do

Define and drive Airbnb's long-term performance strategy across infrastructure efficiency and business objectives.
Lead the development of performance profiling and instrumentation tools for CPU, GPU, memory, and request paths.
Partner with infrastructure teams to ensure optimal utilization of compute resources and reliability.
Connect performance outcomes to business goals and guide engineering teams in maintaining scalable systems.
Evaluate emerging hardware and software technologies and advise on strategic build vs. buy decisions.
Mentor engineers across the organization through design reviews and architectural guidance for performance best practices.

What we're looking for

12+ years of performance engineering experience in high-scale production environments.
Deep understanding of software and hardware interactions at scale, including architectural patterns for performance-critical systems.
Strong familiarity with public cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, Azure) and container orchestration tools like Docker and Kubernetes.
Experience with profiling and instrumentation tooling across CPU, GPU, memory, and distributed request tracing.
Ability to define and drive delivery against company-wide SLOs and influence cross-functional teams.
Proven track record of moving organizations towards long-term performance objectives through technical guidance and mentorship.

Senior Software Engineer, Reliability Experience - Careers

Airbnb

San Francisco, CA 1 day ago

Python Java Grafana Prometheus Kubernetes Docker CI/CD AWS PostgreSQL Redis JavaScript React Vue.js Git Jenkins Terraform Ansible Flask Django

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