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Senior Backend Software Engineer, Media Ingestion & Serving

Airbnb
12 days ago
Full-time
Remote
Worldwide
Remote Engineering

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:

The Media Foundation team is at the forefront of building the platform that powers all of Airbnb's media experiences—from the photos that help guests find their perfect stay to the videos and animations that bring the Airbnb platform to life. 

Joining the team, you will work closely with a skilled group of backend, infrastructure, and cross-platform engineers passionate about building scalable, reliable systems that serve billions of media assets to millions of users worldwide. You'll collaborate across Airbnb on projects ranging from media processing pipelines and intelligent metadata extraction to cost optimization and platform modernization.

The Difference You Will Make:

As a Senior Backend Software Engineer, your expertise will be pivotal in building and scaling the infrastructure that underpins Airbnb's media platform. You will design and implement backend systems that process, store, and serve media assets with high reliability and performance. Your work will directly enable product teams across Airbnb to build richer, more engaging experiences for hosts and guests.

You will have early ownership opportunities in areas such as:

  • Building capabilities to trigger ML/AI analysis on media assets, store extracted metadata, and serve results to downstream teams—enabling richer, smarter experiences for hosts and guests
  • Driving initiatives to reduce infrastructure costs through in-house image transformations, storage optimizations, and vendor consolidation
  • Amplifying the capabilities of our platform in serving images, videos, and additional media types, shaping the cutting-edge media capabilities at Airbnb

If you thrive at the intersection of infrastructure and product impact, and enjoy solving complex distributed systems challenges at scale, this role is for you.

A Typical Day: 

  • Design, develop, and maintain backend services and data pipelines that power media ingestion, processing, and serving at Airbnb scale
  • Build platform capabilities that enable ML/AI teams to trigger analysis workflows, store extrac