# How Airbnb Built an Internal Identity Graph with JanusGraph and DynamoDB

DevFeed: [How Airbnb Built an Internal Identity Graph with JanusGraph and DynamoDB](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/airbnb-s-graph-was-so-slow-they-rewrote-the-engine-18122.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://hungrymindsdev.substack.com/p/airbnbs-graph-was-so-slow-they-rewrote>)

Author: Alexandre Zajac

Published: 2026-05-25T15:30:54Z

Content type: article

Language: en

Sources: [Hungry Minds](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/hungry-minds.md>)

Topics: [graph-database](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/graph-database.md>), [Latency](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/latency.md>), [Scalability](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/scalability.md>), [Software Engineering](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/software-engineering.md>), [Amazon Web Services](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/aws.md>), [Artificial Intelligence](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/ai.md>)

Tags: [database](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/database.md>), [graph](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/graph.md>), [graph-database](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/graph-database.md>), [infrastructure](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/infrastructure.md>), [latency](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/latency.md>), [low-latency](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/low-latency.md>), [scalability](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/scalability.md>), [software-engineering](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/software-engineering.md>)

## AI overview

The article describes Airbnb's internal identity graph infrastructure for trust and safety use cases such as fraud detection, linked-account discovery, and suspicious-activity flagging. It reports that Airbnb replaced a third-party graph database with an internal system using JanusGraph for traversal and DynamoDB for persistence, alongside custom transaction handling, parallel fetches, query rewrites, and tenant isolation.

## Source excerpt

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