Airbnb Senior Software Engineer Guest & Host Recruitment 2026: Apply Online

About the Role: Senior Software Engineer, Guest & Host

Airbnb is seeking a highly skilled and experienced Senior Software Engineer to join the Guest & Host Technology team. This pivotal role is centered around building and scaling the backend systems that manage user identity and privacy across the entire Airbnb platform. You will be working on the foundational layers that ensure trust and security, enabling seamless and authentic connections between millions of hosts and guests worldwide.

The Community You Will Join

The Guest & Host Technology team is at the heart of Airbnb’s user experience. We own the critical identity and privacy layer, which dictates how users are identified and how their data is protected. Our work involves migrating the company’s user reference systems to a more scalable and secure model, moving from raw, global identifiers to relationship-scoped identity. We also build the privacy controls that power features like trip sharing and profile visibility. Getting this layer right is essential for maintaining user trust and ensuring the product functions flawlessly. Our mission is to make sure our systems are robust, secure, and user-centric.

What You Will Make a Difference In

As a Senior Software Engineer, you will play a key role in shaping the future of Airbnb’s identity and privacy infrastructure. Your primary responsibilities will include:

• Designing and implementing robust backend services and APIs that consistently enforce identity and privacy rules across all Airbnb product surfaces.
• Contributing to and leading large-scale, complex migrations, including the development of sophisticated tooling to ensure these migrations are safe and can be rolled out broadly without disruption.
• Defining, evolving, and clearly articulating authorization logic for context-scoped data access, meticulously considering edge cases and variations based on relationships or product contexts.
• Collaborating closely with product teams, including messaging, trips, and profile services, to ensure that privacy primitives are not only usable but also inherently difficult to misuse.
• Actively participating in design and code reviews, consistently raising the bar for code correctness and quality in a codebase where mistakes can have significant consequences.
• Debugging and resolving production issues with a focus on clear, structured root-cause analysis, moving beyond superficial fixes to address underlying problems.

A Typical Day Might Involve:

• Architecting a new service to handle complex authorization scenarios for user data.
• Developing tooling to automate and validate a critical data migration process.
• Collaborating with a product manager to define the technical requirements for a new privacy feature.
• Participating in an on-call rotation to address urgent production issues.
• Mentoring junior engineers on best practices for building secure and scalable systems.
• Writing clear and concise documentation for your designs and implementations.

Your Expertise:

• Experience: 6+ years of professional backend software engineering experience.
• Fundamentals: Strong foundational knowledge in service-oriented architecture, API design, and data modeling.
• Languages: Proficiency in Java and/or Kotlin.
• Environment: Comfort working within a microservices environment, including familiarity with RPC frameworks, service IDLs, and dependency injection.
• System Design: Proven experience designing systems where correctness and authorization are treated as first-class concerns, not as afterthoughts.
• Impact: A demonstrated track record of shipping significant migrations or infrastructure changes that other teams depend on, with a keen eye for backward compatibility and rollout safety.
• Communication: Excellent written communication skills, with the ability to clearly document problems, root causes, and the trade-offs between different solutions.
• Problem Solving: Comfort with ambiguity; the ability to take a complex, evolving requirement (especially in privacy or identity) and translate it into a concrete, actionable technical design.

Location:

This position is eligible for remote work within the United States. While remote, you must reside in a state where Airbnb, Inc. has a registered entity. Please refer to the careers page for an up-to-date list of excluded states, as this list is subject to change.

Our Commitment to Inclusion & Belonging:

Airbnb is dedicated to building a diverse and inclusive workforce. We believe that diverse perspectives fuel innovation and lead to better products and services. All qualified individuals are encouraged to apply. We are committed to providing a disability-inclusive application and interview process. If you require reasonable accommodation, please contact reasonableaccommodations@airbnb.com.

Equal Employment Opportunity:

Airbnb is an Equal Employment Opportunity employer. We consider all applicants without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, age, gender, sex, marital status, ancestry, physical or mental disability, veteran status, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, or any other legally protected characteristic.

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. Airbnb is committed to working with the broadest talent pool possible, believing that diverse ideas foster innovation and engagement. We strive to provide a disability-inclusive application and interview process and are proud to be an Equal Employment Opportunity employer.