Senior Software Engineer

Position: Senior Software Engineer, Cities
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 Cities team serves guests, hosts and regulators to ensure successful global compliance with local regulations. Our mission is to scalably sustain nights booked and growth rate in tens of thousands of cities to meet STR regulation around the globe.

The products we own

• The tier 0/1 flows end-to-end host experience on regulation registration flow, as well as the downstream enforcement mechanisms to help Airbnb comply with regulations.

• The government-facing product - the City Portal – from end to end, establishing relationships with governments around the world.

• The foundational quality services which powers LVF, requirement services and nightcap platform which feeds data to critical pages such as PDP and Host Calendar etc.

• The working environment we have:

• Inclusive and supportive work environment. We promote sustainable engineering practices, well-being / healthy team dynamics, and value differences.

• Career development-- internal mobility, mentoring opportunities, and leadership development opportunities.

• Work on launching and expanding our products across global markets. Seize greenfield opportunities on a fast-growing team.

The Difference You Will Make

This is a high impact opportunity for a software engineer to help develop one of the most critical domains in Airbnb. As a senior member of the team, You will play a pivotal role to build scalable and flexible systems that can model today’s regulations and easily adapt to future changes in this rapidly evolving space. The system will integrate across guest and host facing systems, as well as our government portal and internal tools.

In addition, you will actively engage industry and governmental partners to drive technology strategy to scale compliance including establishment of technology standards.

A Typical Day

• Join a talented group of engineers, work with smart teammates closely on high impact technical initiatives to keep Airbnb business scalable, performant and reliable.

• Build microservices, APIs to drive platform integrations across web and mobile platforms

• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to build interfaces and systems that can evolve to meet critical business needs

• Help set up and lead working group sessions, collaborate on current and upcoming projects including proposal and design doc reviews, roadmap planning, etc.

• Build our platforms--infrastructure, applications and tools, and gain expertise in distributed systems, large compute clusters and petabyte-scale storage infrastructure

• Be part of an impactful team working on scaling distributed applications in a highly-available 24x7 environment, make architectural trade-offs applying design patterns and disciplined execution

Your Expertise

• Bachelor’s and/or Master’s degree, preferably in CS, or equivalent experience

• Over 7 years of industry experience in software development

• Passion and quick on learning.

• Experience on building real-word experience and demonstrable knowledge in any of coding language includes Typescript, Java, Kotlin, Python

• Familiar with frontend web technologies (e.g. HTML, CSS, React and Graphql etc)

• Good understanding of LLM and transformer architectures (GPT, BERT, LLaMA). Have experience in fine-tuning techniques and hyperparameter optimisation.

Experience with ML libraries (Hugging Face, Transformers or Langchain)

• Exposure to architectural patterns of a high-scale web applications, such as well-designed APIs, data pipelines and efficient algorithms

Soft Skills

• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills. Ability to break down complex, ambiguous problems into structured components, identify underlying patterns, and apply data-driven reasoning to propose clear, actionable solutions.

• Self-driven with strong project management abilities. Comfortable…