Airbnb

Senior Backend Engineer, HotelTonight

Save to Kiter
What Airbnb is looking for in applicants

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.

About HotelTonight

Launched in 2011 and acquired by Airbnb in 2019, HotelTonight is a stand-alone hotel-booking service focused on making last-minute trips easy and fun, offering travelers seamless booking and exceptional deals at top hotels. Through features such as Daily Drop, personalized daily hotel deals, HotelTonight uses innovation to enable travelers to plan less and live more, while providing hotels new ways to sell inventory.

About the Role

We’re looking for a Senior Software Engineer with expertise in backend engineering and a passion for building a next generation Hospitality & Booking Platform that our guests and hotel partners love.  This is a unique opportunity to be a part of a fun, entrepreneurial, start-up team where you can have outsized impact -- all under the Airbnb umbrella.

In this role you will work on everything backend related including: ensuring high availability and speed of our APIs, helping scale industry-changing products, building security and anti-fraud solutions, implementing connectivity to our partners, and taking our infrastructure to the next level. Our tech stack is built on  Ruby/Rails, AWS, Terraform, Docker, Kafka, MySQL, Postgres and more.

Job Responsibilities

  • Own and deliver guest & hotel partner facing features
  • Ensure high availability, scalability and speed of our backend
  • Evaluating, identifying & defining improvements to the existing infrastructure 
  • Be the engineering lead on projects, working from ideation to implementation to rollout
  • Work with engineers across other teams to maintain the integrity and reliability of the HotelTonight platform
  • Participate in on-call rotation to continue to meet our critical SLAs
  • Evaluate and experiment with new technologies and techniques that can be added to our tech stack
  • Mentor and support other engineers in the team and related teams

Qualifications

  • 5+ years experience with Rails or similar web application frameworks
  • Problem solver - able to evaluate technical approaches to problems and provide viable alternative solutions
  • Communicator - clearly and effectively communicate with senior stakeholders
  • Experience working with relational databases (MySQL, Postgres) and key/value stores
  • Experience with scaling and maintaining high-traffic production systems in previous positions
  • Experience with server driven UI architectures, patterns, and API design 
  • Strong project scoping and project management skills 
  • Ability to mentor other engineers on the team.

Want some tips on how to get an interview at Airbnb?

What is Airbnb looking for?
If this role looks interesting to you, a great first step is to understand what excites you about the team, product or mission. Take your time thinking about this and then tell the team! Get in touch and communicate that passion.
What are interviews for Senior Backend Engineer like?
Interview processes vary by company, role and team. The best plan is to see what others have experienced and then plan accordingly.
How to land an interview at Senior Backend Engineer?
A great first step is organizing your path to an offer. Check out Kiter for tools to get started!