By allowing people to feel at home while they’re away from home, the founders of Airbnb have created a business that is worth approximately 75 billion dollars. In addition to being popular as a brand and successful as a business, Airbnb is also a great place to work for software engineers. Airbnb offers software engineers lucrative salary packages that are well above the national average.
Software engineers employed with Airbnb enjoy a stimulating career, being constantly exposed to challenges that promote their overall growth and personal harmony.
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In this article, we’ll look at Airbnb software engineer salaries according to tier levels, additional benefits enjoyed by software engineers, and the overall responsibilities that fall under the umbrella of software engineers.
Here’s what we’ll cover:
- Responsibilities of Software Engineers at Airbnb
- Skills and Qualifications of Airbnb Software Engineers
- Airbnb Software Engineer Salaries Across the United States
- Stock Options Offered to Airbnb Software Engineers
- Airbnb Software Engineer Salaries — A Comparison with FAANG Companies
- FAQs on Airbnb Software Engineer Role
Responsibilities of Software Engineers at Airbnb
Airbnb hires software engineers for multiple teams such as front-end, back-end, data security, data engineering, and machine learning, among others. While the domain responsibilities can vary from team to team, the core responsibilities remain (more or less) the same.
These are the broad roles and responsibilities of Airbnb software engineers:
- Create and design new software programs for the website and mobile application
- Design and develop tools that will help to improve customer engagement
- Monitor version codes and keep upgrading software codes to meet new demands
- Test code to spot and fix any bugs that might be hampering website and app performance
- Develop programs for various internal processes and systems
- Explore new software products and integrate them with existing programs
- Design and develop the architecture for business processes and applications
- Upgrade their technical skills and knowledge to find innovative ways to integrate advanced programs into systems and applications
The terms software engineer and software developer are often used interchangeably. Read the Difference Between Software Engineer and Software Developer to understand the differences between them.
Skills and Qualifications Required to be an Airbnb Software Engineer
You must have the following set of skills and qualifications to apply for software engineering positions at Airbnb:
- A degree in computer science, IT, or a related field
- 2+ years of experience in a relevant software engineering field
- Working knowledge of Object-Oriented Programming Languages
- Working knowledge of building and designing algorithms
- Working knowledge of building software tools and applications
- In-depth knowledge in working with scalable distributed systems
While a degree in computer science is usually required to apply for software engineering roles, some companies do accept candidates with equivalent experience or skills. Read How to Become a Software Engineer Without a CS Degree to learn more.
Airbnb Software Engineer Salary Across the United States
Airbnb employs software engineers under different tier levels based on the level of experience and seniority of the position in question. The table below will give you an idea of the different software engineering tier levels at Airbnb and the corresponding salaries. The numbers indicate the average compensation corresponding to the tier level. Take a look below:
As is evident from the table, the stock options offered are higher for higher tier levels, but the bonus pay increases only marginally.
Stock Options Offered to Airbnb Software Engineers
Software engineers at Airbnb receive Restricted Stock Units that come with a vesting period of four years. 25% of the units vest after the completion of one year, and 25% each after completing the second, third, and fourth years respectively.
Airbnb Software Engineer Salaries — A Comparison With FAANG companies
FAANG companies are known to offer excellent compensation packages to software engineers, but so is Airbnb. In this table, we compare the average software engineer salary of employees at Airbnb with FAANG companies.
As you can see, the average salary of software engineers at Airbnb is much higher than the average salaries at Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon.
FAQs on Airbnb Software Engineer Role
1. Which are the coding interview topics that are important for the Airbnb technical interview?
Coding questions asked at the interview are based on Data Structures and Algorithms. The following topics feature at the Airbnb Technical interview: Arrays, strings, linked lists, sorting algorithms — quicksort, merge sort, heap sort, etc., hash tables and queues, recursion, trees and graphs, graph algorithms, including greedy algorithms, and dynamic programming.
2. What are the important Systems Design topics for the Airbnb Software Engineering Interview?
Software engineers applying to developer positions at Airbnb are required to be adept at distributed systems. The following topics feature in Airbnb’s design interviews: Databases, concurrency, API modeling, network protocols and security, sharding, caching, and object modeling.
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