Principal Engineer

The Community You Will Join: 

At Airbnb, our mission is to create a world where anyone can belong anywhere. We aim to provide our users with unique travel experiences by connecting them with local hosts across the globe. Your contributions will shape Airbnb’s user experience and strengthen our commitment to delivering exceptional stays for our guests and hosts. Our work in the User Domain is central to this mission:

• User Passport: You will contribute to building a comprehensive and rich understanding of our users that matches guests with the perfect hosts and homes. Your expertise will help us understand our users and personalize their experiences based on their needs.
• User Reputation: You will be vital in creating a hospitality system that helps Airbnb and hosts deliver magical stays. This requires collecting the right quality signals from users and synthesizing quality signals, including reviews, customer service tickets, and others, to form an accurate understanding of user reputation.
• User Identity: In this role, you will be crucial in establishing user identity workflows, policies, and account management to verify and protect every user account. Your work will help unify the account creation and management process, ensuring a personalized experience based on the types of users.
• User Platform: You will have the unique opportunity to shape the technical and product directions from the beginning. You will be responsible for creating large scalable architecture for one or multiple User domain areas, aligning with other tech and cross-functional leaders from different teams, and leading a group of talented engineers to come up with milestones and execute the design through multiple releases.

The Difference You Will Make:

As a Principal Engineer for the Passport & User Engineering, you will lead the architectural design and strategic direction for our user entity and identity systems over the next 5+ years. You will spearhead initiatives to enhance user product flows, data management, and system integrations across the company, ensuring scalability, performance, and reliability at a global scale.

A Typical Day: 

• Define the long-term architectural vision for the User entity platform, focusing on scalability, performance, and security.
• Drive the design and implementation of high-impact projects that enhance user experience and data integrity across all user interactions.
• Lead cross-functional collaboration with Product, Legal, Data Science, and Engineering teams to deliver holistic and high-quality user-centric solutions.
• Advocate for and implement best practices and standards in system design, development, and maintenance.
• Provide technical mentorship and guidance to engineering teams, fostering a culture of excellence and continuous learning.
• Influence company-wide technology decisions and contribute to the broader architectural roadmap.

Your Expertise:

• BS, MS, or PhD in computer science, related field, or equivalent work experience.
• 15+ years of software engineering experience, with a significant portion dedicated to system architecture and design in consumer-facing technology companies.
• Strong leadership skills, with 5+ years of experience as a senior-level technical lead or architect, driving the technical direction and strategy across multiple teams or projects.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with a proven track record of working effectively across teams and organizations.
• Demonstrated expertise in building and scaling high-availability systems and platforms, with a deep understanding of service-oriented architecture.
• Deep knowledge in the domain of identity and user management is highly desirable.

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.