Staff Software Engineer - Distributed Transactional Database

The Community You Will Join:

The Transactional Storage Services team sits within Airbnb’s Online Data organization that owns all of Airbnb's online serving stores and databases. The group is responsible for designing, building and operating a new source-of-truth, open-source NewSql database running on top of stateful Kubernetes that hosts all the critical Airbnb user, listing and financial data, with all the essential DB capabilities on such as backup restore, CDC, multi-tenancy. 

This stack will also serve as the unified storage backend for Airbnb online data such as MySql, KVStore, GraphDB, etc. With users around the world, reliability, scalability, efficiency, availability, security and platform evolution are our team’s core concerns. As a member of this team you would be working with talented engineers on a modern distributed database system. Building an entire online data ecosystem around a NewSQL database provides distributed systems and database technologists with a front-row seat to how most companies will be building their data systems in the future.

The Difference You Will Make:

We’re looking to add Staff engineers who are hands-on and capable of solving broad and deep technical challenges in the following areas:

• Query and Server 

  • Read and comprehend existing open-source code to understand the system's functionality and architecture, especially around query compilation and performance, as well as change data capture. 

  • Propose and implement enhancements to the database system, ensuring performance, scalability and reliability. Contribute code, documentation, and bug fixes back to the open-source community.

  • Stay up-to-date with the latest developments in database technologies and distributed systems, and influence the company’s long-term roadmap and strategy.

  • Investigating issues of a modern, distributed database running at scale, spanning storage, query, routing layers. Apply inspection/debugging techniques to metrics/telemetry, logs, events, and other information sources to diagnose operational issues, and participate in incident response activities, document and present incident postmortems

• Control Plane and Operations

  • Design frameworks and maintain the general ecosystem around our NewSql database’s monitoring, permissions, service discovery integration, etc.

  • Design, automate critical database operations such as centralized and hierarchical config management system, fully automated image building and release certification for major version upgrades, zero-downtime Blue/Green deployment. 

  • Be part of the team that defines and delivers a generalized database platform for partner KVStore, ORM, MySql teams.

• Migration and Adoption

  • Deliver a zero-downtime forward and reverse replication pipeline with near-real-time consistency between two transactional databases, with correctness guarantee across transactional boundaries. Deliver a robust failover/failback mechanism to guarantee correctness and continuity during unexpected outages.

• Mentorship and leadership in general

  • Participate in regular on-calls and improve the team's operational rigor.

  • Coach more junior members of the team and guide them on iterating on designs and solving the right problems, provide insightful design and code review feedback.

Your Expertise:

• 9+ years of relevant industry experience.

• Hands-on experience in building and operating distributed NoSQL or NewSQL databases and services.

• Solid understanding of distributed systems and infrastructure fundamentals.

• Experience in deep diving and then owning a complex code base.

• Knack for writing clean, readable, testable, maintainable code.

• Ability to decompose large-scale distributed systems and figure out monitoring metrics, failure scenarios and debug them in an efficient manner.

• Strong collaboration and communication skills in a remote-working environment.

• Expertise with a public cloud provider (AWS, GCP, Azure) and their Storage, VM, Networking, Security offerings. E.g. external-dns, route53, ebs etc.

Nice to Haves

• Experience in Java, Go, Rust or C++

• Experience with writing robust automation frameworks and tooling

• Experience with Kubernetes, operator pattern, helm, etc; experience with Infrastructure as Code, such as Chef and Terraform

• Experience with database schema design and query performance profiling

Your Location:

This position is US - Remote Eligible. The role may include occasional work at an Airbnb office or attendance at offsites, as agreed to with your manager. While the position is Remote Eligible, you must live in a state where Airbnb, Inc. has a registered entity. Click here for the up-to-date list of excluded states. This list is continuously evolving, so please check back with us if the state you live in is on the exclusion list. If your position is employed by another Airbnb entity, your recruiter will inform you what states you are eligible to work from.

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: reasonableaccommodations@airbnb.com. 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.