Staff Software Engineer, Knowledge Graph

The Community You Will Join:

Search is central to Airbnb’s marketplace, connecting guests with hosts through personalized and relevant experiences. The Knowledge Graph team, within the Search organization, builds the core data infrastructure that powers these experiences.

We develop scalable systems to extract, organize, and serve structured knowledge across Airbnb — including places, listings, users, and relationships — enabling better search, recommendations, and personalization. We partner closely with product, machine learning, and platform teams to deliver reliable, high-performance graph data systems that are foundational to Airbnb’s product innovation. 

The Difference You Will Make:

As a Staff Software Engineer with strong industry experience in building large-scale infrastructure systems. You’ll help design and scale the data platform behind Airbnb’s graph system, which powers critical product experiences through intelligent data connections.

This is a hands-on, high-impact role focused on scalable data ingestion & consumption, and system performance in production environments.

A Typical Day:

• Design and build robust data infrastructure for both batch and near real-time ingestion into a graph platform.
  Develop and tune system performance for low-latency, high-throughput access to structured data.
• Collaborate cross-functionally with teams in infra, ML, and product to align technical solutions with business goals.
• Debug complex production issues and continuously improve system reliability, observability, and performance.
• Lead design reviews and mentor engineers across the team.

Your Expertise:

• BS/MS/PhD in Computer Science, a related field, or equivalent work experience.
• 9+ years of industry experience with a BS/Masters, and 6+ years with a PhD.
• Proven success in building and maintaining high-scale distributed systems, particularly in data infrastructure, databases, or streaming platforms.
• Hands-on experience with technologies like Kafka, Flink, Spark, or similar for data ingestion and processing.
• Deep understanding of data modeling, storage performance, and system optimization.
• Strong system design and debugging skills, with a focus on real-world reliability and scalability.

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: [email protected]. 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.