Staff Software Engineer, Event logging

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.

The Community You Will Join:

The event logging team owns Airbnb’s platform for capturing user activity events, from page views and searches to backend events, across every client and backend service. We turn raw user activity logs into high-quality data that is available both near-real-time and long-term, and we're building on top of that platform to enable a seamless experience for nearly every engineering team at Airbnb to produce and consume event data.

The Difference You Will Make:

As a member of a diverse and distributed team, you’ll draw on deep backend expertise to drive the technical direction of event logging at Airbnb — owning initiatives that span our logging platform and shaping where it goes next. You’ll partner with and influence teams across the company to identify the highest-impact opportunities in the logging space, set a clear technical vision, and guide its delivery through products and tooling that change how every team produces and consumes event data.

A Typical Day: 

• Collaborate with a wide variety of partner teams to understand their pain points, prototype proposed solutions, and drive adoption of logging products and tooling.
• Own the technical direction and roadmap for a major area of the logging platform, aligning it with broader organizational priorities.
• Lead investments into new technical capabilities that push the envelope and unlock product innovation
• Create and present design, product, and architecture documents and provide feedback on others.
• Translate prototypes to high quality, scalable, and maintainable production code through iterative development.
• Stay up-to-date with the latest industry trends, technologies, and best practices, particularly in the logging and observability space.
• Mentor and provide technical guidance to engineers, fostering a culture of knowledge sharing and continuous learning.

Your Expertise:

• 9+ years of industry engineering experience
• Experience building internal infrastructure, particularly in event logging and observability, preferred
• Strong communication, organizational, and collaboration skills with cross-functional teams
• Deep expertise in one or more backend/server languages (e.g., Java, Kotlin, C++) and a track record of architecting high-traffic backend systems
• Ability to work in areas outside of your usual comfort zone and show motivation for personal growth 
• Expertise developing solutions to ambiguous problems
• Experience mentoring and growing engineers across an organization and driving best practices for software development.
• Demonstrated ability to influence engineering strategy and shape technical priorities across a large organization.

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: [email protected]. 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.  

Pay Range$212,000—$265,000 USD