Staff Web Software Engineer, Prototyping

The Community You Will Join:

The Engineering Prototyping team works closely with partners from Design, Product, and Engineering across Airbnb’s product portfolio. We help teams identify key questions and build software prototypes that answer them. Our work scales from focused explorations that help solve key design or feasibility questions to broad explorations that help validate ideas for new features and capabilities. The team is small but capable: we build prototypes for iOS, Android, and the web, and our work includes prototyping for major released features.

The Difference You Will Make:

As a web prototyper, you will help answer questions by building prototypes for the web. The types of questions you might help answer will vary widely, from “is this possible?” to “is this a good user experience?” to “does this have strategic value for the company?”. Your prototypes will help answer these questions by demonstrating technical feasibility, suggesting implementation approaches, enabling user studies, and more. Those answers will in turn enable leadership to make critical and strategic business decisions.

A Typical Day: 

As a web prototyper, you will create prototypes that enable differentiating and industry-leading product enhancements and introduce the application of advanced and emerging technologies. In this role you will:

• Meet with product managers, designers, and engineers to talk through the challenges they face and identify key questions that can be answered through prototyping
• Choose an appropriate balance between speed and realism that will enable your prototypes to provide answers with sufficient confidence as quickly as possible
• Build APIs that provide data from backend systems for use in your own and in iOS and Android prototypes
• Present your prototypes to leadership and discuss the benefits, costs, and other trade offs uncovered through your work
• Work with leadership to address open questions and challenges identified through prototyping and iterate toward more refined solutions

Your Expertise:

• 9+ years of experience in a hands-on web development role, particularly front-end development
• Expertise with TypeScript/JavaScript 
• Experience building custom interactions, complex animations, and novel user interface components
• Strong communication skills and experience working closely with designers and product managers
• [Bonus] Prior experience in a prototyping role

Your Location:

This position is US - Remote Eligible. The role may include occasional work at an Airbnb office or attendance at offsites, as agreed to with your manager. While the position is Remote Eligible, you must live in a state where Airbnb, Inc. has a registered entity. Click here for the up-to-date list of excluded states. This list is continuously evolving, so please check back with us if the state you live in is on the exclusion list. If your position is employed by another Airbnb entity, your recruiter will inform you what states you are eligible to work from.

Our Commitment To Inclusion & Belonging:

Airbnb is committed to working with the broadest talent pool possible. We believe diverse ideas foster innovation and engagement, and allow us to attract creatively-led people, and to develop the best products, services and solutions. All qualified individuals are encouraged to apply.

We strive to also provide a disability inclusive application and interview process. If you are a candidate with a disability and require reasonable accommodation in order to submit an application, please contact us at: [email protected]. Please include your full name, the role you’re applying for and the accommodation necessary to assist you with the recruiting process. 

We ask that you only reach out to us if you are a candidate whose disability prevents you from being able to complete our online application.