Software Engineer, Infrastructure (2-8 YOE)

Airtable’s infrastructure is evolving to meet the needs of our fast growing engineering org. We are looking for backend engineers to join our team to help improve critical product infrastructure, with a focus on building systems that have a great developer experience and will scale as we grow.

We currently have openings on:

• Asynchronous Serving (SF and NYC): The Asynchronous Serving team is scaling critical systems used by Airtable’s most essential and up-and-coming product features. Upcoming projects include revamping the scheduler of our background job queue, adding quality of service to the job queue, and revamping a streaming service to handle 10x scale.
  
• Base Infrastructure (SF and NYC): The Base Infrastructure team owns the system that powers the core of Airtable’s product--serving Airtable bases. We are investing in the foundations of our homegrown in-memory database. Key projects include building replication to support zero downtime failovers, optimizing performance and memory usage, and vertical scaling.
  
• Compute (SF Hub Only): The compute pod’s charter is to make it easy for services to be built and operated in an easy and safe manner. This pod is responsible for building and operating our Kubernetes based platform, upon which all Airtable services run on. As a result, this team has high leverage in making a significant impact on the company across various dimensions: developer enablement, service reliability, and infrastructure cost. We're looking for experienced engineers who have built internal compute platforms before. We have an exciting roadmap filled with initiatives such as 
  • Providing higher level primitives and abstractions than those offered by native Kubernetes, for building & deploying workloads in a way that's deeply integrated with the rest of Airtable's infrastructure
  • Bringing up compute stack in a new region in <1 week
  • Developing Kubernetes CRDs and operators to address some of Airtable's unique scalability challenges
    
• Deploy Infrastructure (SF Hub only): The Deploy Infrastructure pod's mission is to empower Airtable product engineers to rapidly and safely iterate on their code via continuous deploys. We leverage systems including Kubernetes, Spinnaker, Terraform and home-built infrastructure to build a robust and fast deployment process and a powerful canary system.
  
• Developer Platform (SF and NYC): The Developer Platform team sits at the intersection of all engineering at Airtable, focusing on building the internal tooling, frameworks, and CI/CD systems that power our product teams. We strive to streamline developer workflows—from build and test cycles to production deployments—and foster a best-in-class developer experience. Join us if you’re passionate about creating high-leverage solutions that enable engineers to deliver features quickly, reliably, and at scale.
  
• Observability (SF and NYC): The Observability team's mission is to empower Airtable's engineering team with effective monitoring and debugging tools. We provide actionable insights into errors and crashes, and improve performance through enhanced visibility. You’ll build tools that are in-use by nearly every engineer at Airtable in our logging, metrics, and tracing pipelines.
  
• Performance & Architecture (SF and NYC): This team is responsible for expanding the volume of data that can be stored in an Airtable application. This work spans from pure data volume to request handling throughput and parallel user support within a single Airtable application. The team also partners with management to identify new strategic opportunities to enhance user experience by creating new backend infrastructure that can unlock new products. As part of this role, you will help coach other team members and improve overall team effectiveness. 
  
• Storage (SF Hub Only): The Storage team’s mission is to accelerate product development at Airtable by providing scalable, reliable, and easy-to-use storage abstractions. We use RDS MySQL, DynamoDB, Redis, and TiDB. We’re looking for folks interested in distributed systems and databases who are excited to work on business-critical, petabyte-scale storage systems. You will own all aspects of building, running, and improving these systems, from the underlying infrastructure all the way to the developer-facing code abstractions.
  
• Traffic (SF and NYC): The Traffic Team is adding foundational systems and abstractions to Airtable’s infrastructure to support our growing, multi-region service. Design and introduce systems like service mesh while evolving existing mechanisms for RPC, handling load spikes, and transient cloud failures! 

Please note: while we employ a hybrid working model at Airtable (flexible in working from the office or elsewhere), we are looking to hire candidates who are based in the San Francisco Bay Area (depending on team match) who are open to coming into the office at least ~2-3 times/week for team collaboration.

Learn more about our Engineering team and values here.

What you'll do

• Proactively identify and lead significant improvements to Airtable’s infrastructure, working across teams and product areas to maximize business and engineering impact.
• Work on systems-level problems in a complex design space where scalability, efficiency, reliability, and security really matter.
• Build clean, reusable, and maintainable abstractions that will be used by Airtable’s engineers for years to come.
• Take full ownership of components of Airtable’s infrastructure, including responsibility for reliability, performance, efficiency, and observability of our production environment.

Who you are

• You have 2-8 years of industry experience, and are excited about learning new technologies and applying them in a fast-changing environment. Please note this is not a new grad position. 
• You have experience in areas such as databases, distributed systems, service-oriented architectures, and data infrastructure.
• You derive joy from refactoring and building clean abstractions in order to make complex systems fun to develop on and easy to understand.
• You have a strong background in computer science with a degree in CS or a related field.
• You are currently based or willing to relocate to the San Francisco Bay Area.

Airtable is an equal opportunity employer. We embrace diversity and strive to create a workplace where everyone has an equal opportunity to thrive. We welcome people of different backgrounds, experiences, abilities, and perspectives. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, protected veteran status or any characteristic protected by applicable federal and state laws, regulations and ordinances. Learn more about your EEO rights as an applicant. 

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If you have a medical condition, disability, or religious belief/practice which inhibits your ability to participate in any part of the application or interview process, please complete our Accommodations Request Form and let us know how we may assist you. Airtable is committed to participating in the interactive process and providing reasonable accommodations to qualified applicants.