# Senior Software Engineer, Storage at Airbnb

- Company: Airbnb
- What the company does: Get an Airbnb for every kind of trip → 8 million vacation rentals → 2 million Guest Favorites → 220+ countries and regions worldwide. Backed by General Catalyst, Greylock and Kleiner Perkins.
- Company website: http://www.airbnb.com/
- Type: Startups
- Level: Senior
- Location: United States
- Work setup: On-site
- Posted: 2026-09-14
- Apply by: 2026-10-29
- Apply: https://careers.airbnb.com/positions/8165656?gh_jid=8165656
- Page: https://www.1752.vc/careers/jobs/airbnb-senior-software-engineer-storage/

## About the role

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. In this role you'll dig into database internals to diagnose and fix SQL latency and availability issues. You'll also work closely with our open-source database vendor on root cause analysis and upstream contributions.

## What they're looking for

- 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
- 5+ years of software engineering, including significant hands-on work on a database storage layer or query execution engine

Tags: Software Engineering