Senior Systems Engineer – Tech Foundations

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in United States.

📋 Description

• Develop systems that support Airbnb's content management, which includes sophisticated authoring, streamlined content workflows, content-quality analytics, compliance auditing, and AI-enhanced writing experiences.

• Take full ownership of significant projects throughout the software development lifecycle, including task breakdown, planning, and leading a small engineering team when necessary.

• Collaborate with content, product, and engineering teams to enhance authoring workflows and convert them into technical specifications.

• Provide reporting, product integrations, and AI-enhanced authoring and editing functionalities.

• Share technical stewardship of Contentstack, enriching it with custom UI extensions and React authoring applications that adhere to Airbnb’s Design Language System.

• Create integrations for structured taxonomy and knowledge graph functionalities across support and knowledge platforms.

• Enhance content organization, security, and discoverability through taxonomies, controlled vocabularies, and metadata standards.

• Design with a focus on reliability, security, maintainability, and observability; identify potential failure points, engage in incident response, and implement corrective measures.

• Refine or phase out low-quality code, services, and frameworks while contributing to technical design and code evaluations.

• Document technical solutions, analyze data, develop hypotheses, experiment, and iterate effectively.

• Mentor and coach engineers, assist with onboarding, provide constructive feedback, and contribute to interviewing and Airbnb’s technical community.

• Guide AI agents to investigate systems, prototype solutions, generate and evaluate code, and verify changes while ensuring accountability for accuracy and quality.

⛳️ Requirements

• Over 5 years of experience designing and implementing intricate systems from start to finish within integrated enterprise environments.

• Demonstrated experience in building and maintaining custom tools for authors, workflows, automations, and integrations in an enterprise headless CMS; familiarity with Contentstack is preferred.

• Proven track record of overseeing project delivery across multiple workstreams, including those with loosely defined scopes.

• Proficiency in both front-end and back-end development, ideally with TypeScript, React, and Node.js.

• Strong understanding of large-scale content data analysis, bulk updates, and reporting, particularly in processing substantial data volumes efficiently.

• Capability to develop and manage high-performance, scalable, fault-tolerant internal tools while considering failure modes and operational requirements.

• Expertise in agentic development workflows and directing AI agents for exploration, prototyping, implementation, and review.

• Ability to produce clear technical writing and design documentation that outlines benefits, risks, and trade-offs.

• Experience in mentoring engineers and providing actionable feedback.

• Comfort in navigating ambiguity and defining problem scopes.

• Ability to foster alignment, manage projects, and collaborate with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

• Preference for experience with structured data in enterprise taxonomy or knowledge graph platforms.

• Familiarity with architectural patterns of large-scale web applications, well-designed APIs, high-volume data pipelines, and efficient algorithms is preferred.

• Experience with Tableau or Grafana is a plus.

• A degree (BS, MS, or PhD) in Computer Science or a related field is preferred.

• Must reside in a state where Airbnb, Inc. has a registered presence.

🏝️ Benefits

• Eligibility for bonuses.

• Opportunity for equity participation.

• Access to benefits.

• Employee Travel Credits.

• Remote work opportunities.

• Possibility of occasional work at an Airbnb office or participation in offsite events, as agreed upon with the manager.

• Reasonable accommodations provided throughout the recruitment process.