Staff Software Engineer, Cities

Our Company

Founded in August of 2008 and based in San Francisco, California, Airbnb is a trusted community marketplace for people to list, discover, and book unique travel experiences around the world. Whether an apartment for a night, a castle for a week, or a villa for a month, Airbnb allows people to Belong Anywhere through unique travel experiences at any price point, in more than 85,000 cities and over 191 countries. We promote a culture of curiosity, humanity, and creativity through our product, brand, and, most importantly, our people.

Our Team

The Cities team focuses on creating tools and services that support home-sharing and our community of hosts in the larger ecosystem, with external stakeholders like neighbors, cities, governments, and other public sector institutions. We do this by partnering with those stakeholders to create win-win solutions that support our community and benefit society at large. 

 

The team is developing a regulatory product platform that allows us to offer product solutions to cities around the world that are based on our policy objectives. Instead of exclusively building custom tools for each city, we have embarked on building an industry-first scalable platform which we use to create jurisdiction-specific solutions efficiently. Our long-term goal is to be able to launch a solution in any city with minimal to no engineering effort. 

 

To accomplish these goals, we work closely with Policy teams around the globe, and Legal, Data Science and Operations colleagues. This invigorating cross-functional partnership is a defining element of software engineering on the Cities team, one that maximizes the impact of the products we build and contributes to Airbnb’s leading position in the home-sharing economy. If you are passionate about using technology to make a positive impact on the world, this is the right team for you!

What You’ll Do

As a Staff Senior Software Engineer on the Cities team, your work will directly contribute to one of the most potent elements of Airbnb’s commitment to operate as a 21st-century company by enabling us to strengthen, partner with, and earn the trust of the communities we serve. The software systems you build will help cities implement and manage home-sharing regulations at scale around the world, and make it easier for our hosts to know about and comply with those regulations.

You will work with a team of talented, passionate, mission-driven developers and a diverse set of partners and stakeholders across product, design, data science, policy, operations, and legal disciplines.

Your contributions will take a variety of forms, including:

• Building a long-term regulatory platform with well-defined APIs that is service-oriented, modular, granular, observable, configurable, and efficient
• Developing an industry-first portal that enables city officials to directly understand the impact of Airbnb on their communities and manage compliance with local regulations, as applicable
• Creating highly-automated, auditable, access-controlled tools for Airbnb compliance managers to address off-platform compliance issues
• Designing intuitive experiences for hosts that make it simple for them to learn about and comply with their local regulations
• Acting as a role model and mentor for other engineers on the team through your visible commitment to best engineering practices

What You’ll Need to Succeed

• 8+ years of full-time work experience in software engineering, information technology, or a related domain
• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in computer science, or equivalent experience
• Passion for delivering products end-to-end, from ideation through planning and scoping to implementation and experimental A/B testing
• Proficiency in one or more back-end server languages (Java/Ruby/C#/C++/etc.)
• Fluency with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and related web technologies

• Experience with modern JavaScript libraries and tooling (e.g. React) is a bonus

• Expertise in popular storage systems such as relational or noSQL databases
• Ability to write high-performance production-quality code
• Willingness to work across the stack to address technical challenges anywhere in the system
• Experience in designing and building large-scale production systems
• Experience with SOA (service-oriented architecture) design patterns
• Success at mentoring others and leading by example
• Strong written and verbal communication skills
• Attention to detail, bias for action, and the ability to tackle ambiguous problems
• Desire to work collaboratively in cross-functional teams with design, product, data science, policy, operations, and legal partners