Jobs / United States / Airbnb
Staff Software Engineer, Passport & Commerce (Backend)
Airbnb · 🇺🇸 United States
Sponsorship verdict
Sponsorship possible
One solid signal, not two — worth applying, and worth asking about sponsorship early.
- Employer is on a government sponsor recordThe US Department of Labor certified 167 H-1B/E-3 labor condition applications for this employer between Oct 2025 and Jun 2026 (latest Jun 2026) — the step every H-1B hire needs first. USCIS also records 71 H-1B approvals in FY2023. Source: LCA disclosure data (US Department of Labor (OFLC)).
- The posting doesn’t mention sponsorshipSilence isn’t a refusal — ask the recruiter before investing much time.
- No salary bar for this routeH-1B has no fixed salary bar: the employer must pay at least the prevailing wage for the role and area. Cap-subject employers enter a lottery weighted by wage level. Source: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/12/29/2025-23853/weighted-selection-process-for-registrants-and-petitioners-seeking-to-file-cap-subject-h-1b, rules effective 2026-02-27.
- What Airbnb paid sponsored hires in similar roles82 certified filings for “Software Engineer” (Software Developers) in CA: $191k–$204k, median $196k. Most were filed at wage level III (45%) — 3 lottery entries, ≈46% projected selection odds for cap-subject employers. Source: US Department of Labor LCA disclosure data (Oct 2025 – Jun 2026).
- Confirmed live todayWhen a source last listed this job as open.
US H-1B: cap-subject employers enter a lottery weighted by wage level — Level I gets 1 entry, Level IV gets 4 (DHS projected selection odds ≈15% at Level I to ≈61% at Level IV). Universities and non-profit research employers are cap-exempt. The $100,000 fee for new petitions from abroad is currently blocked by a court order (appeal pending).
A verdict summarises public evidence; it is not legal advice and never a guarantee — the employer and the immigration authority decide. Sign in to factor in where you can already work.
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Sponsor Radar — Airbnb
The US Department of Labor certified 167 H-1B/E-3 labor condition applications for this employer between Oct 2025 and Jun 2026 (latest Jun 2026) — the step every H-1B hire needs first. USCIS also records 71 H-1B approvals in FY2023. Source: LCA disclosure data (US Department of Labor (OFLC)).
Past sponsorship or register membership never guarantees sponsorship for this vacancy or for you. Full Sponsor Radar for Airbnb →
About the role
Airbnb was born in 2007 when two hosts welcomed three guests to their San Francisco home, and has since grown to over 5 million hosts who have welcomed over 2 billion guest arrivals in almost every country across the globe. Every day, hosts offer unique stays and experiences that make it possible for guests to connect with communities in a more authentic way. The Community You Will Join: Passport & Commerce builds the trusted account and commerce foundation that lets anyone, anywhere, become part of the Airbnb community — from their first sign-up, through the profile and connections they build, to every booking and business transaction along the way. We're a newly formed org within Guest & Host that brings together identity, account, and commerce foundations under one roof. Our mission is to move Airbnb beyond the transaction — building a world where accounts create trust, value sticks, and what our community earns travels with them, and their businesses, wherever they go. You'll work closely with Payments and Wallet engineering, Identity & Privacy, Profile & Community, and Guest & Host product, design, and data science partners as we stand up this team's roadmap and technical foundations. The Difference You Will Make: As a Staff Software Engineer on the Passport team, you will be a key architect behind the next generation of our account platform, directly influencing how millions of guests and hosts experience Airbnb. You'll set technical direction for how account state, eligibility, and entitlements are computed, stored, and served at scale across every surface where a guest or host interacts with Airbnb. Success in this role looks like a Passport platform that is reliable and extensible enough to support new programs and partner integrations without re-architecture — measured through service reliability (uptime, latency, correctness of entitlement calculations), the speed at which new offerings can launch, and adoption of your platform by other teams across Airbnb. A Typical Day: • Design and evolve the core services and data models that track account state, eligibility, and entitlements across millions of accounts • Partner with product and design to translate new product concepts into scalable, extensible technical designs • Collaborate with Payments and Wallet engineering to ensure credits, discounts, and host-funded programs settle correctly end-to-end • Set technical direction and lead design reviews across a growing team, mentoring engineers and raising the bar on system design • Drive cross-team architecture decisions with Identity & Privacy and Profile & Community teams to keep account state consistent with Airbnb's broader Passport model • Identify and resolve reliability, scalability, and data-integrity risks before they affect guests or hosts Your Expertise: • 9+ years of experience designing and scaling complex, distributed backend systems, with a proven track record of technical leadership in high-growth environments • A track record as a technical leader who has set architecture direction for a team or domain — not only delivered individual features • Deep expertise in distributed systems fundamentals, including data consistency, caching, service decomposition, and API design at scale • Experience building or operating systems involving financial transactions, entitlements, or other stateful account data is strongly preferred • Experience mentoring senior engineers and influencing technical decisions across multiple teams • Comfort operating with ambiguity on a newly formed team, including helping define team scope, roadmap, and technical foundations • Strong written and verbal communication skills, with experience driving alignment across engineering, product, and design partners Your Locat