Build and operate the production network infrastructure connecting all of Airbnb's services

Airbnb's Networking team, within Cloud Infrastructure, owns the company's entire production network — traffic proxies, load balancers, service mesh, VPC/backbone, cross-region connectivity, and network security/monitoring. This engineer will work on cloud-native networking from Layer 3 to Layer 7, contributing to service mesh (Istio), cross-region gateways, and multi-region network architecture on public clouds. Requires 2+ years of relevant software development experience plus public cloud networking expertise (AWS/GCP/Azure, VPC, Security Groups, PrivateLink) and comfort being on-call for production infrastructure.

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What this interview tests

Public cloud network architecture (AWS/GCP/Azure): VPC, Security Groups, PrivateLink
Service mesh and cloud-native networking (Istio, Envoy) from Layer 3 to Layer 7
Operating large-scale networking systems: edge proxies, DNS, CDN, gateways
Multi-region network design, cross-region gateways, global load balancing
On-call ownership and incident response for production infrastructure

Common question themes

Explain how VPC design, security groups, and PrivateLink interact in a multi-account cloud setup

Walk through how a service mesh like Istio handles traffic routing and security

Describe a large-scale networking system you built or operated and its failure modes

Tell me about a production incident you were on-call for and how you resolved it

How would you design cross-region gateways for global traffic load balancing

How do you approach edge security for services exposed to the internet

How candidates describe it

Real Software Engineer interview stories — retold from candidates' public write-ups, with sources.

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