Staff Software Engineer, Internationalization

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 Difference You Will Make:

The Internationalization team (i18n team) aims to foster global belonging and offer the best localization experience by providing reliable, efficient, scalable, and extensible globalization infrastructure and tooling for Airbnb code, content, and stakeholders. In Bytelevel Research’s 2024 Globalization Report Card, Airbnb ranked #3 among the top 150 global companies, and #1 (for three years in a row) among all companies in the Travel & Hospitality sector.

The I18n team is a part of the Core Services org within Infrastructure and works closely with our broader Globalization business org, as well as Product and Platform teams with an international focus, to contribute directly to top-line goals as well as make the entire engineering organization more productive. We are infrastructure engineers with a human focus: customer-centric, quality driven, helpful and empathetic.

A Typical Day: 

Millions of users across the world engage with the Airbnb app in their preferred languages every day across a wide range of assets - in-app features, locations, media, and much more. 

The engineer on the I18n Infra team will work on distributed systems, infrastructure, toolings, and workflows, which are critical to the success of Airbnb products among our global audience. The i18n Infra team owns a wide range of components, with different level requirements on performance and customization, to adapt to the complexities of global markets and business. In this role, you will have need to:

• Build scalable systems supporting high volume real time translation requests and efficient retrieval of translated content
• Build intuitive workflows and tools to serve the needs of our stakeholders, business partners, and end users
• Partner with a broad range of cross-functional stakeholders to determine the right strategy for localization across asset categories
• Drive down costs, improve quality, and land efficiency wins via impactful optimizations and infrastructure upgrades
• Be part of an impactful infrastructure team while contributing to and learning industry best practices on internationalization
• Mentor and partner effectively with other engineers and the leadership team to build a positive team culture

We’re looking for engineers who can:

• Drive (responsible and accountable for) projects with large open-ended scope spanning a product or platform, and contribute to organizational priorities.
• Influence stakeholders and coordinate across functions to adopt effective goals or roadmaps, collaborate and deliver.
• Foster an inclusive environment for immediate team members and cross-functional partners, and ensures effective communication
• Define and incorporate standards for quality and operational excellence for the i18n products/services.
• Be owners and stewards of Airbnb’s multilingual capabilities

Your Expertise:

• Bachelor’s and/or Master’s degree, preferably in CS, or equivalent experience
• 9+ years of industry experience
• Strong programming (Java / Kotlin / C++ or equivalent) skills for hands-on IC work
• Demonstrate strong expertise and be hands-on in backend systems within large-scale service-oriented architectures.
• Experience with designing and building large scale production systems or features
• Experience in popular storage systems such as relational databases, noSQL and caching.
• Experience or desire to work collaboratively in cross-functional teams and stakeholders
• Able to architect localization infrastructure with a good understanding of client facing interfaces, and willing to dive into JavaScript / Typescript and related web technologies
• Experience with modern JavaScript libraries and tooling (e.g. React and GraphQL) is a plus
• Passionate about globalization, user experience, efficiency, availability, and system quality

Your 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. While the position is Remote Eligible, you must live in a state where Airbnb, Inc. has a registered entity. Click here for the up-to-date list of excluded states. This list is continuously evolving, so please check back with us if the state you live in is on the exclusion list. If your position is employed by another Airbnb entity, your recruiter will inform you what states you are eligible to work from.

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.