Airbnb

Staff Software Engineer, Tax Platform

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What Airbnb is looking for in applicants

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 Tax Platform team owns global tax products such as Value Added Taxes (VAT), Transient Occupancy (TOT), and Tax Withholding across the following pillars: tax quotation, tax user data, invoicing and reporting.

As a global company, we recognize that the taxes our hosts and we pay are an essential element of our contribution to the economies and communities in which we operate. Therefore, our mission is to ensure that Airbnb promptly pays the correct amount of tax in the jurisdictions we operate.

Tax policy across the globe is constantly in flux, and Airbnb has to adapt to these changes quickly. 

As a Staff Software Engineer, you will help us meet this challenge with innovative solutions that enable business agility, efficiency, and accuracy. You are eager to understand complex systems top to bottom and thrive working across technologies and codebases. In addition, you will excel at working through ambiguity, concept validation, and implementing a best-in-class solution. 

 

Your day-to-day responsibilities will include:

  • Be the technical lead and owner of Airbnb Tax platform, working through ambiguity, concept validation and implementation of a best-in-class solution
  • Build our platforms--infrastructure, applications and tools using your expertise in distributed systems, large compute clusters and petabyte-scale storage infrastructure
  • Help build out the team, cultivate innovation and growth by driving cross-collaboration and execution of projects across multiple teams
  • Be a player/coach of our high-performance team to ensure code quality, commitment to craft and operational excellence
  • Scale distributed applications in a highly-available 24x7 environment, make architectural trade-offs applying design patterns and disciplined execution
  • Work with cross-functional teams with design, product, data science, and research partners to drive engineering decisions and influence outcomes

 

Why Join:

  • Inclusive and supportive work environment. We promote sustainable engineering practices, well-being / healthy team dynamics, and value differences.
  • Career development-- internal mobility, mentoring opportunities, and leadership development opportunities.
  • Work on launching and expanding our protection products across global markets.
  • Seize greenfield opportunities on a fast-growing team.
  • Deliver on a strategic, multi-year platform roadmap and global rollout. 
  • Collaborate with product, engineering, data science, data engineering, and numerous platform teams within Airbnb.

 

Projects We Are Working On:

  • Architect a global taxpayer information product to collect and validate tax identifiers from all countries where Airbnb operates with a high-quality user experience
  • Build end-to-end pipelines to report data to global tax authorities 
  • Develop a robust invoicing platform, including advanced electronic invoice capabilities, to deliver tax invoices to our host and guest communities 
  • Stabilize the end-to-end tax quotation flow, from data inputs to accurate quotes on 84M bookings annually 
  • Deliver on business priorities to drive quality host and guest experiences.
  • Architect and build a world-class Tax Hub for our community to manage taxes collected, taxpayer information, and tax documents necessary for operating their businesses

What we are looking for:

  • Bachelor’s degree or equivalent practical experience
  • 10+ years of software development experience, or 7+ years with an advanced degree
  • Prior real-word experience and demonstrable knowledge in any of Java, Python, Go, Rust, C/C++/C#
  • Experience architecting and/or developing concurrency, multithreading and synchronization in large-scale distributed systems
  • Experience or desire to work collaboratively in cross-functional teams with design, product, data science, and research partners.
  • Ability to effectively communicate with non-technical stakeholders.

Bonus Qualifications

  • Master’s or PhD in Computer Science, Computer Engineering or related technical field and demonstrable real-world experience
  • Hands-on technical leadership leading multiple teams and setting technical direction
  • Expertise with database design and internals, database language theories and implementation 
  • Expertise architecting and developing solutions to ambiguous problems, and integrations across multiple teams with significant impact
  • Expertise with global infrastructure, networking, massive data storage systems, load balancing, etc.

The starting base pay for this role is between $190,000 and $245,000. The actual base pay is dependent upon many factors, such as: education, experience, and skills. The base pay range is subject to change and may be modified in the future. This role may also be eligible for bonus, equity, benefits, and Employee Travel Credits.

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What is Airbnb looking for?
If this role looks interesting to you, a great first step is to understand what excites you about the team, product or mission. Take your time thinking about this and then tell the team! Get in touch and communicate that passion.
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