Airbnb is looking for a Staff Software Engineer, GraphQL to drive platform reliability and operational excellence for our unified data access layer, Viaduct. This critical platform handles over 70% of Airbnb's API traffic. You will contribute to the next-generation GraphQL platform, focusing on observability, performance, and AI-powered tooling to empower hundreds of internal and open-source developers.

What You'll Do

Design and implement deployment pipelines, SLO frameworks, observability tooling, performance improvements, and AI-enabled incident response automation to maintain 99.99% uptime.
Contribute to runtime resiliency initiatives including resource attribution, performance regression testing, and proactive monitoring.
Architect and deliver AI-powered operational tooling that accelerates incident triage and reduces mean-time-to-mitigation.
Shape the future of Viaduct Modern by contributing to next-generation architecture and improving developer experience.
Investigate and resolve complex production issues by analyzing distributed traces, resource utilization patterns, and system metrics.
Design and implement observability features including span instrumentation, SLO dashboards, and fine-grained attribution for tenant workloads.
Develop and iterate on tooling for deployment triage, service health monitoring, and incident response automation using LLM capabilities.
Lead technical design discussions and RFCs for initiatives like performance regression testing pipelines and emergency deployment workflows.
Partner with tenant teams to debug performance issues and provide guidance on GraphQL best practices.
Contribute to open-source Viaduct by ensuring platform improvements are generalizable and well-documented.

What We're Looking For

9+ years of software engineering experience, with significant depth in backend systems, distributed architectures, and platform engineering.
Deep expertise in observability and monitoring, including experience designing SLO frameworks, distributed tracing systems, and metrics pipelines at scale.
Proven track record in reliability engineering, with hands-on experience in incident response, root cause analysis, and building systems that maintain high availability (99.99%+).
Strong experience with performance tuning and resource management in JVM-based systems, including profiling, garbage collection optimization, and understanding of concurrency models.
Experience operating critical, high-traffic systems with a focus on deployment safety, automated rollbacks, and progressive delivery strategies.
Strong leadership and communication skills with the ability to partner effectively across infrastructure and product engineering teams.

Nice to Have

Familiarity with GraphQL or similar API gateway/data access layer technologies.
Experience building developer tooling and platforms, with a product mindset focused on developer experience and self-service capabilities.

Technical Stack

GraphQL
JVM
Kotlin

Team & Environment

This role is part of the Application Platform pillar of Infrastructure. You will work closely with partner infra teams such as Build Infra, Service Platform, CI/CD, Reliability, Observability, and Developer Platform, as well as product engineers.

Benefits & Compensation

Compensation: $204,000—$255,000 USD + eligible equity
Bonus
Equity
Benefits
Employee Travel Credits

Work Mode

This role follows a local-country work mode and is open to candidates based in the USA.

Airbnb is proud to be an Equal Employment Opportunity employer. All individuals seeking employment are considered without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, age, sex, marital status, ancestry, physical or mental disability, veteran status, gender identity, sexual orientation, or any other legally protected characteristic.