Staff Software Engineer (Passport & Commerce, Backend)

• Passport & Commerce builds the trusted account and commerce foundation that lets anyone, anywhere, become part of the Airbnb community — from their first sign-up, through the profile and connections they build, to every booking and business transaction along the way
• We’re a newly formed org within Guest & Host that brings together identity, account, and commerce foundations under one roof
• Our mission is to move Airbnb beyond the transaction — building a world where accounts create trust, value sticks, and what our community earns travels with them, and their businesses, wherever they go
• You’ll work closely with Payments and Wallet engineering, Identity & Privacy, Profile & Community, and Guest & Host product, design, and data science partners as we stand up this team’s roadmap and technical foundations
• As a Staff Software Engineer on the Passport team, you will be a key architect behind the next generation of our account platform, directly influencing how millions of guests and hosts experience Airbnb
• You’ll set technical direction for how account state, eligibility, and entitlements are computed, stored, and served at scale across every surface where a guest or host interacts with Airbnb
• Success in this role looks like a Passport platform that is reliable and extensible enough to support new programs and partner integrations without re-architecture — measured through service reliability (uptime, latency, correctness of entitlement calculations), the speed at which new offerings can launch, and adoption of your platform by other teams across Airbnb
• A Typical Day:
• Design and evolve the core services and data models that track account state, eligibility, and entitlements across millions of accounts
• Partner with product and design to translate new product concepts into scalable, extensible technical designs
• Collaborate with Payments and Wallet engineering to ensure credits, discounts, and host-funded programs settle correctly end-to-end
• Set technical direction and lead design reviews across a growing team, mentoring engineers and raising the bar on system design
• Drive cross-team architecture decisions with Identity & Privacy and Profile & Community teams to keep account state consistent with Airbnb’s broader Passport model
• Identify and resolve reliability, scalability, and data-integrity risks before they affect guests or hosts

Benefits

• Paid volunteer time
• Health food and snacks
• Generous parental and family leave
• Learning and development
• Annual travel and experiences credit- Experience mentoring senior engineers and influencing technical decisions across multiple teams
• Deep expertise in distributed systems fundamentals, including data consistency, caching, service decomposition, and API design at scale
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, with experience driving alignment across engineering, product, and design partners
• A track record as a technical leader who has set architecture direction for a team or domain — not only delivered individual features
• 9+ years of experience designing and scaling complex, distributed backend systems, with a proven track record of technical leadership in high-growth environments
• Comfort operating with ambiguity on a newly formed team, including helping define team scope, roadmap, and technical foundations
• Experience building or operating systems involving financial transactions, entitlements, or other stateful account data is strongly preferred