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

Airbnb is a mission-driven company dedicated to helping create a world where anyone can belong anywhere. It takes a unified team committed to our core values to achieve this goal. Airbnb's various functions embody the company's innovative spirit and our fast-moving team is committed to leading as a 21st century company.

The Networking team within Airbnb’s Cloud Infrastructure org owns the entire Airbnb production network infrastructure. The group is responsible for designing, building and operating the software and solutions that connect Airbnb users and services, such as traffic proxy and load balancer, service mesh, VPCs and cross-region connectivity, network monitoring and security systems etc. With users around the world, reliability, scalability, efficiency and high availability are our team’s core concerns.

The Difference You Will Make

You will work closely with peers across Cloud Infra, Security, Reliability, and many other partner teams across the company to deliver an Airbnb network platform that is flexible, efficient, always available, and scales with the needs of the business. As the first Network engineering lead in Airbnb’s Brazil office, you will also have the opportunity to help bootstrap and grow the networking team in our new San Paulo office. This will include day-to-day operations, building the team by hiring top talent, coaching and growing engineers, technical deep dives, community engagement, and strategic planning.

A Typical Day

Provide meaningful input to technical designs and direct hands-on contributions to projects in the cloud networking space
Grow, lead, and manage a small team of talented engineers
Support your team's professional growth and maintain high performance through mentorship and coaching
Work with tech leads, peers, and partners to define and execute on a coherent vision and roadmap for Airbnb’s cloud network infrastructure and related components
Work with open source communities (e.g. istio) to build the next generation service mesh for all Airbnb back-end services
Build cross-region gateways and load balancers for global Airbnb services
Work with external partners and internal engineering and security teams to deliver edge security systems that protect Airbnb services
Nurture a culture of technical quality from design, through code review, to production
Build strong partnership and alignment with teams across engineering
Nurture relationships with open source communities and external service partners

Your Expertise

Professional fluency in English required
2+ years of engineering management experience, with 8+ years of relevant software development experience in a fast paced tech environment
Strong emotional intelligence, empathy, and the ability to effectively connect with colleagues
Experience with a public cloud provider (AWS, GCP, Azure) and their networking service offerings
Experience running large scale networking systems and software (e.g. proxies, DNS, gateways)
Experience with Istio service mesh, k8s and cloud native technologies is a plus
Excellent communication skills and the ability to work well with teams across the engineering organization (e.g. reliability, compute, security, etc.)
Strong problem-solving skills and experience leading teams on-call for production infrastructure
Passionate about efficiency, availability, technical quality and system quality

Airbnb Cloud Infrastructure in the Media

Zero-downtime Istio upgrades across thousands of pods/VMs – InfoQ coverage - 2025
KubeCon+CloudNativeCon 2024, Secure Outgoing Traffic: Building a powerful Internet Egress Gateway for Reliable connectivity, Edie Yang, Akshita Agarwal.
KubeCon+CloudNativeCon 2024, DNS deep dive in k8s with CoreDNS, Jingming Guo
The Airbnb Tech Blog 2023, Improving Istio Propagation Delay, Ying Zhu
KubeCon+CloudNativeCon 2022, Whose packet is it anyway? Life of a packet through service mesh, Kevin Leimkuhler, Doug Jordan.
Building simplified service mesh API for developers -2022
KubeCon+CloudNativeCon 2021, Building a multi-cluster/env service mesh at Airbnb. Weibo He, Stephan Chan.
10 More Weird Ways to Blow Up Your Kubernetes -2021
Airbnb on Istio - 2021
Airbnb Service Discovery: Past, Present, Future (Challenges of Change) - 2020
Developing Kubernetes Services at Airbnb Scale - 2019
10 Weird Ways to Blow Up Your Kubernetes - 2020
Did Kubernetes Make My p95s Worse? - 2020
Scaling Kubernetes to Thousands of Nodes Across Multiple Clusters, Calmly - 2020

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. All qualified individuals are encouraged to apply.

We strive to also provide a disability inclusive application and interview process. If you are a candidate with a disability and require reasonable accommodation in order to submit an application, please contact us at: reasonableaccommodations@airbnb.com. Please include your full name, the role you’re applying for and the accommodation necessary to assist you with the recruiting process.

We ask that you only reach out to us if you are a candidate whose disability prevents you from being able to complete our online application.