Senior Staff Backend Software Engineer, GraphQL

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: Viaduct is a unified data access layer connecting most of Airbnb’s online data. More than 70% of Airbnb’s API traffic flows through the Viaduct platform. Residing at the center of Airbnb’s tech stack between the user-facing products and backend infrastructure, Viaduct provides a global schema & query system through a GraphQL interface. The Viaduct team is a very tenured and experienced team, setting the best practices and next-gen architecture for Airbnb. As part of the Application Platform pillar of Infrastructure, we work closely with partner infra teams (Build Infra, Service Platform, CI/CD, Reliability, Observability, Developer Platform to name a few) as well as product engineers. We treat our platform as a product and follow the principles of good Platform Engineering Viaduct has been running in production for over six years and the team has gained a lot of experience in operating a GraphQL platform at scale. These insights informed the major rewrite - called Viaduct Modern - which we’re in the process of launching and continue to evolve. You will join the effort to create the best developer experience of hundreds of engineers at Airbnb using our revolutionary GraphQL platform. Viaduct has been released as an Open Source project. Your contributions to the Viaduct platform will not only serve Airbnb-internal developers, but also any member of the Open Source community who chooses to adopt Viaduct. The Difference You Will Make: Orchestrate and influence multiple technical tracks on the team from the core query engine and performance infrastructure to API ergonomics and reliability tooling, ensuring they interlock into a coherent, world-class developer platform. Champion the evolution of Viaduct’s global GraphQL schema: guide the multi-partner steering committee, strengthen governance processes, and drive a long-term vision that scales with Airbnb’s growing product surface and data-as-a-service strategy. Act as a multiplier for senior talent on the team: mentor teammates, cultivate technical leadership across Viaduct sub-teams,

Required Skills