Senior Software Engineer Guest & Host

Job description

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: Guest & Host Technology builds the end-to-end experience that connects people around the world. Our team owns the identity and privacy layer beneath that experience: the systems that determine who can see what about whom, in what context, and why. That includes migrating how the rest of the company references users (moving from raw, global user identifiers to relationship-scoped identity), and building the privacy controls behind features like trip sharing and profile visibility. Get this layer wrong and it either breaks trust or breaks the product; our job is to make sure it does neither. The Difference You Will Make: We're looking for a Senior Software Engineer to help build and scale the backend systems behind user identity and privacy. You'll be reasoning about relationship-scoped access (who's allowed to see this, given the specific context they're asking from), and building systems that other teams across the company depend on to do the same correctly. You'll work across true backend fundamentals: service architecture, data modeling, authorization logic, and migration tooling that needs to run safely at Airbnb's scale without breaking the dozens of teams who consume these systems. A Typical Day: Design and build backend services and APIs that enforce identity and privacy rules consistently across the company's product surfaces Contribute to large-scale migrations (e.g., moving service and client code off legacy identity patterns) — including the tooling that makes those migrations safe to run broadly, not just the one-off fixes Define and evolve authorization logic for context-scoped data access, and reason clearly about edge cases (e.g., who's allowed to see what, and why that answer differs by relationship or product surface) Partner with the teams building on top of your systems — messaging, trips, profile, and beyond — to make sure privacy primitives are usable and hard to misuse Participate in design and code reviews, and raise the bar for correctness on a part of the codebase where mistakes are costly Debug and resolve production issues with clear, structured root-cause analysis rather than surface-level fixes Your Expertise: 6+ years of professional backend software engineering experience, with strong fundamentals in service-oriented architecture, API design, and data modeling Proficiency in Java and/or Kotlin, and comfort working within a microservices environment (RPC frameworks, service IDLs, dependency injection) Experience designing systems with correctness and authorization as first-class concerns, not an afterthought A track record of shipping migrations or infrastructure changes that other teams depend on, with attention to backward compatibility and rollout safety Strong written communication. You can clearly document a problem, its root cause, and trade-offs between solutions before escalating or proposing a fix Comfort with ambiguity: you can take a complex, evolving privacy or identity requirement and turn it into a concrete technical design without needing every detail spelled out Your Location: This posi