Staff Software Engineer, Build (Bazel)

The Developer Infrastructure organization’s mission is to enable Airbnb engineers and AI Coding Agents to ship high quality software with confidence and speed. We work on infrastructure that accelerates Airbnb’s engineering productivity across all stages of the build/test/deploy software development lifecycle.

Build infrastructure has the potential to be one of the highest-leverage investments for our engineering organization as we attempt to accelerate the iteration loop of engineers and AI agents operating within our developer platform.

To deliver these improvements, you will operate within the CI+Build team, which owns developer infrastructure that includes remote build systems, CI clusters, flaky test management, and merge queues. The team’s goal is to keep mainline green and PR cycle times fast.

Your role will give you the opportunity to define and deliver world-class build systems at Airbnb’s scale, while driving technical direction for build infrastructure spanning multiple platform teams. Our internal customer teams deliver systems used by product engineers across backend, web, and mobile. Furthermore, to be successful in this role, you will need to be comfortable diving into the application architecture of some of our largest internal backend services as we manage a build graph that continues to grow in complexity.

• Architecting improvements to our existing Bazel installation, and remote build/cache infrastructure to improve correctness, reproducibility, and speed.

• Setting the technical roadmap for software build system reliability and performance.

• Accelerating inner-loop development velocity, along with CI run-times, by diagnosing and resolving build performance bottlenecks, including remote execution efficiency, cache hit rates, and critical path analysis.

• Driving organizational alignment on build system investments across multiple teams and technical domains.

• Serving as the technical authority on build systems across Airbnb: setting standards, mentoring senior engineers, and owning build architecture decisions across multiple repos.

• Partnering with Security on optimizing build processes related to base images.

• Ensuring a commitment to craft and operational excellence.

• Bachelor’s and/or Master’s degree, preferably in CS, or equivalent experience.

• Metrics-driven approach to decision-making, with a track record for delivering quantifiable impact and presenting to engineering leadership.

• Expertise in Bazel, and concepts such as action graph, dependency analysis, remote caching.

• Driving cross-organizational alignment and decisions for investments.

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.