Senior Backend Software Engineer, Media Ingestion & Serving
About the role
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
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 extracted metadata, and access media intelligence across product surfaces
- Work closely with engineers from product teams across Airbnb, understanding their media needs and building self-serve solutions to address them
- Continuously optimize and improve the performance, reliability, and cost-efficiency of existing media infrastructure
- Stay current with industry trends in distributed systems, media processing, ML infrastructure, and workflow orchestration frameworks
- Mentor and guide team members in their career development, fostering a culture of continuous learning and growth
Your Expertise:
- 5+ years of experience in backend software engineering, with strong foundations in building and operating large-scale distributed systems, and demonstrated experience with media-related technologies (image processing, video transcoding, or metadata management)
- Experience building data pipelines, batch processing systems, or platforms that support ML/AI workflows is highly valued
- Proficiency in Java, Kotlin, or similar backend languages, with experience designing APIs and data models
- Excellent collaboration and communication abilities, with a track record of p