Senior Software Engineer, Knowledge Graph

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:

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 Senior 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:

• Partner with infra and product teams to deeply understand use case requirements and define the technical vision for the Knowledge Graph.

• Design, build, and scale the end-to-end (E2E) Travel Graph infrastructure, prioritizing a robust and easy-to-use platform for all consumers and producers of graph data.

• Lead the large-scale data onboarding strategy, focusing on a user-friendly experience for ingesting diverse data sources (1st and 3rd party data, derived signals) via both batch and Near Real-Time (NRT) pipelines.

• Ensure seamless, high-performance integration of the Knowledge Graph with a variety of downstream systems, including Search, Machine Learning, and Analytics.

• Debug complex production issues and continuously improve system reliability, observability, and performance.

Your Expertise:

• BS/MS/PhD in Computer Science, a related field, or equivalent work experience.

• 5+ years of industry experience with a BS/Masters, and 3+ 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.

• Hands-on experience applying AI/ML techniques to data infrastructure problems. Experience with large language models (e.g., Claude, LLMs) for productivity is a plus.

• 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.

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
$196,000—$230,000 USD