Senior Software Engineer, Global Markets (Backend)
Job description
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.
NOTE: NO VISA SUPPORT
The Community You Will Join:
The Global Markets Tech team drives the evolution of our guest and host experience across international markets through product innovation that accelerates international growth. Expanding in under-penetrated markets is a core pillar of our company strategy. To achieve this, we innovate at every level - adapting our product to the unique needs of every corner of the globe so that every user across our 220+ countries and regions feels right at home.
The team partners closely with Product, Design, Data Science, regional stakeholders, and core platform/vertical teams to translate local market needs into durable, scalable technology that can be piloted quickly and then rolled out broadly.
The Difference You Will Make:
A Senior Software Engineer in Global Markets is expected to deliver measurable international growth impact by building scalable product capabilities across key funnel surfaces (landing → search → pre‑booking) and by improving pricing, promotions, and discounts to increase conversion and customer value across markets.
A Typical Day
- Partner with PM/Design/Data Science to clarify goals, requirements, constraints, and success metrics, and translate them into a sequenced technical plan.
- Write or review technical designs, align tradeoffs, and coordinate dependencies with partner teams across regions.
- Build production code and services with a high quality bar: testing, documentation, instrumentation, and performance/reliability considerations.
- Run design and code reviews, advise engineers, and help drive consistent engineering standards across the team.
- Own delivery: track execution risks, provide stakeholder updates, coordinate launches (including localization/market rollout), and monitor post-launch results to iterate quickly.
Your Expertise
- Fluency in English is required. Japanese or Korean working proficiency is a plus .
- 6+ years of hands-on software engineering experience, with a strong track record shipping production systems.
- Solid understanding of large-scale backend architecture and distributed systems patterns (e.g., well-designed APIs, scalable data models, high-throughput services/pipelines, and performance-aware algorithms).
- Proven ability to drive ambiguous problems to resolution: break down open-ended requirements, propose pragmatic solutions, and execute independently while keeping stakeholders aligned.
- Strong programming skills in one or more of the following: Java, Kotlin, Python, Ruby/Ruby on Rails, JavaScript/TypeScript, with experience building and operating backend services.
- High engineering quality bar: you write clean, testable, maintainable code, and you design with reliability, observability, and operational readiness in mind.
- You actively raise the team’s technical bar through thoughtful code reviews, architecture discussions, and sharing best practices that improve overall team productivity.
- Data-informed decision making: you use metrics and experimentation to validate impact, diagnose issues, and iterate toward better outcomes—recognizing that small improvements in these flows can drive meaningful business results.
- Strong collaboration and communication skills: you work effectively across engineering teams and with Product, Design, and Data partners in a global environment.