Senior Manager of Technical Program Management, Airbnb
Data, Reliability & Developer Experience
$232-282k
Community marketplace for holiday accomodation
Be an early applicant
Community marketplace for holiday accomodation
1001+ employees
Be an early applicant
$232-282k
1001+ employees
Company mission
To create a world where anyone can belong anywhere.
Role
Who you are
- We are looking for a candidate with a robust technical background who deeply understands the problem space, drives requirements, and leverages their infrastructure engineering expertise to resolve strategic challenges that align with Airbnb’s larger goals
- 12+ years in technical program management, software engineering, or SRE, including 5+ years leading and mentoring TPMs or managers of TPMs, creating a culture of inclusiveness and sustainability
- Demonstrated ability to work through ambiguity to detailed solutions. You can take a vague problem, crisply frame the challenge, identify a path forward, ramp up quickly on new technologies, and drive an initiative over the finish line
- Strong technical grounding in at least two of: distributed data systems (Spark, Trino, Flink/Kafka, Iceberg), Kubernetes and cloud infrastructure, observability platforms, or CI/CD, build systems, and monorepos
- Track record of leading multi-quarter, multi-team platform migrations or deprecations at scale
- Self-motivated, proactive and proven ability to adapt well and work with teams having different operating cadences
- Sound business judgment, a proven ability to influence others, strong analytical skills, and a track record of taking ownership, leading data driven analyses, and influencing results
- Experience delivering infrastructure for AI workloads or AI-assisted engineering, such as feature platforms, LLM gateways, agentic developer tooling, or scaling CI/CD for AI-generated code
- Deep familiarity with progressive delivery, canary and automated rollback practices, SLOs and error budgets, and incident management
- Excellent written and oral business communication and people skills, with the ability to influence stakeholders
What the job involves
- Airbnb's mission is to create a world where people can Belong Anywhere. As we grow to achieve that mission, we're looking to add a technical, hands-on, and mission-driven Senior Manager of Technical Program Management (TPM) for the Infrastructure TPM team. You will lead a team of TPMs driving multi-org programs across Data Infrastructure, Reliability Engineering, and Developer Experience
- Data Infrastructure builds the batch, streaming, and real-time data and feature platforms, semantic metrics layer, and query engines that power analytics, experimentation, and ML, and is making the data stack AI-ready and cost-efficient at scale
- Reliability Engineering provides the observability, alerting, incident response, and deployment-safety platforms (progressive delivery and automated rollback) that keep Airbnb highly available and resilient
- Developer Experience scales the end-to-end developer workflow, including source control, CI, build, code review, deployment, and cloud development environments, so engineers and AI agents can ship quality software quickly and safely
- In this role, you will collaborate closely with data, infrastructure, and product teams across Airbnb to develop holistic solutions that ensure the Airbnb platform is robust, highly available, and transparent in its operations. You will partner closely with senior ICs and engineering directors across Airbnb on processes, strategy, and execution
- Our team of TPMs demonstrate ownership, apply skills in whatever combination necessary, and make order out of chaos to achieve the desired outcome
- We work hard to ensure teams understand what they have to deliver and by when
- We are responsible for aligning teams, identifying or highlighting dependencies, recognizing and resolving ambiguity, setting expectations, anticipating risk, identifying and removing roadblocks, and ensuring the desired business goals are achieved
- We are looking for people who share our passion for tackling complexity head-on while building a world class team of Technical Program Managers
- Shape and influence the technical direction of projects, ensuring we meet stakeholder needs while maintaining high-quality standards
- Drive phased rollouts and large-scale platform migrations, from pilot through adoption to deprecation, with clear exit criteria and minimal disruption to product teams
- Balance broad, outcome-driven thinking with attention to critical details, exercising sound judgment to prioritize where deep focus is necessary to ensure successful execution
- Define and secure stakeholder alignment on clear, measurable success criteria, such as availability and SLOs, CI and merge latency, cost per workload, and adoption, and hold programs accountable to them
- Regularly assess risks and opportunities, and devise proactive mitigation strategies to maintain momentum and project success
- Maintain transparent and effective communication channels to keep stakeholders informed of progress, developments, and challenges
- Expertly present outcomes and updates to senior leadership, clearly and comprehensively articulating trade-offs, risks, and emerging opportunities
- Hire, develop, and coach a team of senior TPMs, and set operating standards for planning, execution, and portfolio reporting across Infrastructure
- Lead programs that prepare infrastructure for AI-driven scale, from CI, source control, and merge systems that absorb higher change volume to agentic developer workflows and AI-ready data platforms
- Partner with engineering and finance on infrastructure efficiency programs, including utilization, cost attribution, and workload-normalized cost reduction
- Drive cross-org reliability programs such as incident review follow-through, SLO adoption, and deployment-safety rollouts
- Own Infrastructure planning rhythms (OKRs, roadmap reviews, dependency mapping) across Data, Reliability, and Developer Experience
Our take
When Airbnb was originally founded, the product helped customers book air mattresses on people's apartment floors. Since then, Airbnb has had over a billion customers hosted through its platform. With more than 4 million registered hosts worldwide, it has grown into a major player in the hospitality sector.
Airbnb has been successful in disrupting the traditional holiday lettings sector. Before it existed accommodation was limited to hotels and bed and breakfasts, but Airbnb has mainstreamed the idea of renting out spare rooms or even entire homes. It has created a new sector of hosts purchasing properties to rent out on the platform and provides a level of flexibility and a range of offerings not previously possible for travelers.
Perhaps a victim of its own success, by 2022 supply of Airbnb-listed properties began to outstrip demand in some markets, as hosts overestimated the appetite for domestic travel. However, the company is still posting strong financials and has unveiled new tools to support its hosts in a tougher rental market. With a healthy bottom line and a huge user base, Airbnb is very likely to overcome the current market turbulence and continue its growth.
Kirsty
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
25% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 10 rounds)
Apr 2020
$500m
GROWTH EQUITY VC
Mar 2017
$447.8m
SERIES F
Total funding: $3.8bn
Company benefits
- Paid volunteer time
- Health food and snacks
- Generous parental and family leave
- Learning and development
- Annual travel and experiences credit
Company HQ
Showplace Square, San Francisco, CA
Leadership
Brian Chesky
(Co-Founder & CEO)Previously an Industrial Designer, studying at Rhode Island School of Design.
Nathan Blecharczyk
(Co-Founder & CSO)Studied Computer Science at Harvard, and had around 4 years of professional Software Engineering experience before founding Airbnb, including interning at Microsoft.
Joe Gebbia
(Co-Founder)Also studied Industrial Design at Rhode Island, and previously founded various design-related startups
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