Principal Software Engineer, Performance

Airbnb

Lead performance engineering strategy at Airbnb, ensuring infrastructure efficiency and product performance. Collaborate with teams to evaluate technologies and mentor engineers on best practices.

Posted 4/20/2026full-timeRemote • 🇺🇸 United StatesLead💰 $292,000 - $365,000 per yearWebsite

Tech Stack

Tools & technologies

AWSAzureCloudDockerGoogle Cloud PlatformKubernetes

About the role

Key responsibilities & impact

Define and drive Airbnb's long-term performance strategy, spanning product performance, infrastructure efficiency, and business objectives for scale and growth
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
Partner with infrastructure teams across compute, reliability, backend frameworks, and AI Infra to ensure the fleet operates at optimal utilization
Connect performance outcomes to business objectives and company-wide SLOs, and guide engineering teams in keeping the stack scalable and efficient
Evaluate emerging hardware and software technologies, engage with the external solutions ecosystem, and advise on build vs. buy decisions in areas of strategic importance
Mentor and technically uplevel engineers across the organization through design reviews, architectural guidance, and performance best practices

Requirements

What you’ll need

12+ years of performance engineering experience in high-scale, high-growth production environments
Deep understanding of how software and hardware systems interact at scale, including architectural patterns for performance-critical stacks. You know the difference between a bad algorithm and a bad cache eviction policy, and you're comfortable in the kernel, in the JVM, and in a post-mortem
Strong familiarity with public cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and container orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes)
Experience with profiling and instrumentation tooling across CPU, GPU, memory, and distributed request tracing
Demonstrated ability to define performance objectives and drive delivery against company-wide SLOs across multiple organizations.
You know how to move organizations, not just codebases: you've influenced teams that don't report to you, made the case for long-term investments over short-term fixes, and mentored engineers who went on to do exceptional work
Strong communication and influence skills; comfortable driving technical direction with senior engineering and product leadership.

Benefits

Comp & perks

This role may also be eligible for bonus, equity, benefits, and Employee Travel Credits.

ATS Keywords

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Applicant Tracking System Keywords

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Hard Skills & Tools

performance engineeringperformance profilinginstrumentationCPUGPUmemoryrequest tracingarchitectural patternsalgorithm optimizationcache eviction policy

Soft Skills

mentoringinfluencingcommunicationtechnical directioncollaboration