Principal Software Engineer, Performance

Role Description

Airbnb's infrastructure is scaling fast in the AI era: more compute, more GPU spend, more complexity across the stack. The Infrastructure Performance team exists to ensure that growth doesn't come at the cost of speed, reliability, or efficiency. We treat performance as a first-class engineering property - measurable, continuously improving, and enforced across the software lifecycle.

This is the most senior performance engineering role at the company. In this role, you won't be handed a roadmap. You'll build one.

The Performance team owns performance across the full stack:

• CPU and GPU fleet utilization
• Backend service efficiency
• End-to-end request latency
• Storage
• ML infrastructure
• Observability

As the TL for the Performance team, you will partner with engineering teams to tie infrastructure performance directly to user experience and business outcomes.

Most performance engineering roles are reactive: triage a regression, close the ticket. This one is different. You'll be setting the strategy, defining what "good" looks like, and building systems that make performance a default property of how Airbnb ships software.

Responsibilities

• 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.
• Partner with infrastructure teams across compute, reliability, backend frameworks, and AI Infra.
• Connect performance outcomes to business objectives and company-wide SLOs.
• Evaluate emerging hardware and software technologies.
• Mentor and technically uplevel engineers across the organization.

Qualifications

• 12+ years of performance engineering experience in high-scale, high-growth production environments.
• Deep understanding of how software and hardware systems interact at scale.
• 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.
• Strong communication and influence skills.

Location

This position is US - Remote Eligible. The role may include occasional work at an Airbnb office or attendance at offsites, as agreed to with your manager.

Our Commitment To Inclusion & Belonging

Airbnb is committed to working with the broadest talent pool possible. We believe diverse ideas foster innovation and engagement, and allow us to attract creatively-led people, and to develop the best products, services and solutions.

How We'll Take Care of You

Our job titles may span more than one career level. The actual base pay is dependent upon many factors, such as: training, transferable skills, work experience, business needs and market demands. This role may also be eligible for bonus, equity, benefits, and Employee Travel Credits.

Pay Range

$292,000 — $365,000 USD