Description
We are seeking a highly experienced Principal Software Engineer to join our Infrastructure Performance team. As a key member of this team, you will be responsible for defining and driving Airbnb's long-term performance strategy, spanning product performance, infrastructure efficiency, and business objectives for scale and growth.
In this role, you will lead the architecture and development of performance profiling and instrumentation infrastructure, covering CPU, GPU, memory, request hot paths, utilization, and deployment events, making these capabilities available to all backend teams.
You will partner with infrastructure teams across compute, reliability, backend frameworks, and AI Infra to ensure the fleet operates at optimal utilization.
You will connect performance outcomes to business objectives and company-wide SLOs, and guide engineering teams in keeping the stack scalable and efficient.
You will evaluate emerging hardware and software technologies, engage with the external solutions ecosystem, and advise on build vs. buy decisions in areas of strategic importance.
As a mentor and technical leader, you will uplevel engineers across the organization through design reviews, architectural guidance, and performance best practices.
To be successful in this role, you will need to have 12+ years of performance engineering experience in high-scale, high-growth production environments.
You will need to have a deep understanding of how software and hardware systems interact at scale, including architectural patterns for performance-critical stacks.
You will need to have strong familiarity with public cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and container orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes).
You will need to have experience with profiling and instrumentation tooling across CPU, GPU, memory, and distributed request tracing.
You will need to have demonstrated ability to define performance objectives and drive delivery against company-wide SLOs across multiple organizations.
You will need to have strong communication and influence skills; comfortable driving technical direction with senior engineering and product leadership.