Senior Software Engineer, Storage

About the role

The Online Data organization helps Airbnb's builders create real-time data experiences through intuitive data interfaces and tools, with no database expertise required. Within Online Data, the Transactional Storage Services team owns the core storage infrastructure behind Airbnb's online data systems. We design, build, and operate a new source-of-truth, horizontally scalable, open-source NewSQL database running on stateful Kubernetes. It holds Airbnb's critical user, listing, and financial data. You'll join the Database Kernel team, which owns performance, reliability, and stability for Airbnb's NewSQL engine at scale. The team's work centers on the storage layer and query execution engine, and also covers consensus and shard management.

Responsibilities

• Dig into the query and storage layers to explain latency differences between B-tree and LSM-based storage engines.
• Analyze query plans and execution paths (planning, optimization, operators, and distributed execution) to find and fix sources of SQL latency.
• Tune storage engine behavior (compaction, caching, and I/O) for Airbnb's workloads.
• Design and implement traffic prioritization at the storage layer for connection pooling.
• Drive root cause analysis on high-severity incidents with our open-source vendor, and land fixes upstream.

Requirements

• 5+ years of software engineering, including significant hands-on work on a database storage layer or query execution engine.
• Strong SQL skills, plus an understanding of how queries are planned, optimized, and executed at the engine level.
• Deep understanding of storage engine internals (e.g., B-tree/LSM, compaction, indexing, I/O) and/or query processing (e.g., planning, optimization, execution operators).

Qualifications

• Experience with distributed databases (replication, consensus, transactions) is a strong plus, and familiarity with NewSQL systems like TiDB is a bonus.
• Ability to own and dive deeply into a complex database codebase, ideally an open-source one.
• Upstream contributions are a plus.
• Experience analyzing and debugging high-severity production incidents, especially performance and latency problems.
• Writes clean, testable, maintainable code.

Skills

• Strong collaboration and communication skills in a remote working environment.
• Strong ownership and a consistent track record of delivery.

Benefits

• Eligible for bonus, equity, benefits, and Employee Travel Credits.

Pay

The base pay range is $196,000—$230,000 USD. Actual base pay depends on factors such as training, transferable skills, work experience, business needs and market demands.