Senior Backend Engineer, GraphQL

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:

• Viaduct is a unified data access layer connecting most of Airbnb’s online data. More than 70% of Airbnb’s API traffic flows through the Viaduct platform.

• Residing at the center of Airbnb’s tech stack between the user-facing products and backend infrastructure, Viaduct provides a global schema & query system through a GraphQL interface.

• Our team mission: “Empower app developers at Airbnb by delivering a seamless and efficient developer experience. We strive to maximize productivity and spark creativity through simplified APIs, improved performance, and the cultivation of tenant team autonomy.”

• The Viaduct team is a very tenured and experienced team, setting the best practices and next-gen architecture for Airbnb.

• We work closely with infrastructure teams (Build Infra, Service Platform, CI/CD, Reliability, Observability, Developer Experience to name a few) as well as product engineers.

• We treat our platform as a product and follow the principles of good Platform Engineering

The Difference You Will Make:

• Viaduct has been running in production for over six years and the team has gained a lot of experience in operating a GraphQL platform at scale. These insights informed the major rewrite - called Viaduct Modern - which we’re in the process of launching and continue to evolve. You will join the effort to create the best developer experience of hundreds of engineers at Airbnb using our revolutionary GraphQL platform.

• Viaduct has been released as an Open Source project. Your contributions to the Viaduct platform will not only serve Airbnb-internal developers, but also any member of the Open Source community who chooses to adopt Viaduct.

A Typical Day:

• Code in a high-impact, deep-complexity domain. We value a deep-work culture and ensure you have protected focus time to solve hard problems.

• Share knowledge and learn from your teammates through collaboration and pairing.

• You will navigate ambiguity, taking abstract requirements and refining them into concrete technical roadmaps to improve platform reliability and capabilities.

• Partner with our customers - the Viaduct tenant teams - to support their mission to ship an industry-leading user experience.

• Contribute to the planning process that informs the strategy and roadmap for the Viaduct platform.

• We value sustainable engineering practices. We share on-call responsibilities across a large team and prioritize long-term reliability fixes to minimize off-hours pages.

Your Expertise:

• 6+ years of experience in a relevant role - ideally in a team that owned a developer platform

• Proficiency and interest working cross-team with both product and infrastructure engineers

• Experience operating critical online backend services

• Comfort shipping high visibility, complex coding projects

• Strong preference: expertise with GraphQL, Kotlin, AI-enabled development flows

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.

How We'll Take Care of You:

Our job titles may span more than one career level. The actual base pay is dependent upon many factors, such as: training, transferable skills, work experience, business needs and market demands. The base pay range is subject to change and may be modified in the future. This role may also be eligible for bonus, equity, benefits, and Employee Travel Credits.

Pay Range
$191,000—$225,000 USD