Airbnb
Principal Software Engineer, Performance
Remote Software Engineering role with clear candidate location fit.
PostedRecently added
Eligible countries1 accepted country
Seniority signalLead
Work settingRemote
Accepted candidate locations
USA
Role overview
Principal Software Engineer, Performance
Requirements and responsibilities
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Details
- Define and drive Airbnb's long-term performance strategy, spanning product performance, infrastructure efficiency, and business objectives for scale and growth
- Lead the architecture and development of performance profiling and instrumentation infrastructure, covering CPU, GPU, memory, request hot paths, utilization, and deployment events, making these capabilities available to all backend teams
- Partner with infrastructure teams across compute, reliability, backend frameworks, and AI Infra to ensure the fleet operates at optimal utilization
- Connect performance outcomes to business objectives and company-wide SLOs, and guide engineering teams in keeping the stack scalable and efficient
- Evaluate emerging hardware and software technologies, engage with the external solutions ecosystem, and advise on build vs. buy decisions in areas of strategic importance
- Mentor and technically uplevel engineers across the organization through design reviews, architectural guidance, and performance best practices
- 12+ years of performance engineering experience in high-scale, high-growth production environments
- Deep understanding of how software and hardware systems interact at scale, including architectural patterns for performance-critical stacks. You know the difference between a bad algorithm and a bad cache eviction policy, and you're comfortable in the kernel, in the JVM, and in a post-mortem
- Strong familiarity with public cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and container orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes)
- Experience with profiling and instrumentation tooling across CPU, GPU, memory, and distributed request tracing
- Demonstrated ability to define performance objectives and drive delivery against company-wide SLOs across multiple organizations.
- You know how to move organizations, not just codebases: you've influenced teams that don't report to you, made the case for long-term investments over short-term fixes, and mentored engineers who went on to do exceptional work
- Strong communication and influence skills; comfortable driving technical direction with senior engineering and product leadership
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