Senior Staff Data Engineer, Airbnb
Foundational Data
$248-310k
More information about location
Community marketplace for holiday accomodation
Be an early applicant
Community marketplace for holiday accomodation
1001+ employees
Be an early applicant
$248-310k
More information about location
1001+ employees
Company mission
To create a world where anyone can belong anywhere.
Role
Who you are
- You do not need prior experience with cloud cost, infrastructure, or AI/ML data to succeed here
- 12+ years of relevant industry experience with a BS/Masters, or 9+ years with a PhD, in data engineering or a closely related field
- You have designed, built, and operated production data pipelines at large scale, and you write strong SQL and Python. Scala experience is useful but not required
- You can design a dimensional model and define a metric others will trust, even if analytics engineering has not been your job title
- You have moved into an unfamiliar data or technical domain and become productive quickly, building enough understanding of the underlying systems to model them well
- You have been the technical lead on a team or program, setting direction that other senior engineers executed against without formal authority over them, while still writing code yourself
- You have written the multi-year technical strategy for an area, and got other organizations to fund and deliver against it
- You have built a data product where no schema or precedent existed, and persuaded other teams to adopt it
- You have written the document that aligned several teams on a contested technical decision, and you can explain a data model to a finance partner as readily as to an engineer
What the job involves
- At Airbnb, our mission is to create a world where anyone can belong anywhere. The Foundational Data team builds and operates the high-quality, widely reused datasets that power critical decisions across Airbnb: how visitors are measured from site traffic, how bot traffic is separated from organic traffic, and how cloud costs are attributed to Airbnb services
- Our cost dashboards are among the most-used at Airbnb, relied on by technical leads, finance, and executives. Every dollar Airbnb spends running its infrastructure is attributed by models this team owns
- We are now building a third pillar, and it puts this team at the forefront of how Airbnb measures AI: the cost, usage, and performance of the models we train and serve ourselves, and of the AI tools our own engineers use every day. When Airbnb asks whether an AI investment is paying off, the answer comes from datasets this team builds
- Foundational Data sits inside Cloud Infrastructure and is a deliberate mix of Data Engineers and Analytics Engineers working as one team
- As a Senior Staff Data Engineer, you are the technical leader for this team and the person who sets its direction
- This is a hands-on role with no direct reports: you will own the long-term data architecture and you will build against it, from the Airflow-orchestrated pipelines that ingest telemetry, logs, and billing data through to the dimensional models and Minerva definitions that thousands of people at Airbnb reason with
- Because we are a mixed DE and AE team, you will work across both disciplines: this role needs data engineering depth, plus enough fluency in metric and dimensional modeling to set direction for the analytics engineering side
- Infrastructure intelligence is where you will start, and it is fresh ground. The signals describing our fleets are fragmented across cost, utilization telemetry, service performance, and GPU and model telemetry
- Nobody has modeled this coherently yet, and the AI side is the least charted part of all. There is no schema to inherit. You would decide what these datasets are, then bring the rest of the company along
- This work carries regular visibility to directors and VPs across Infrastructure and Finance
- Provide technical leadership across the team's data engineering and analytics engineering work, spanning cloud cost, traffic & bots, and infrastructure intelligence
- Define and own the multi-year data strategy and architecture for Airbnb's foundational data assets, and build the cross-org consensus needed to fund and execute it
- Own how Airbnb measures its AI: the unit economics of training and serving our own models, GPU fleet utilization, and the cost and adoption of developer AI tooling
- Design and build the datasets that integrate cost, utilization, performance, and reliability signals across Airbnb's infrastructure fleets, starting from a blank page
- Stay hands-on in the pipelines and models you architect, close enough to the build to catch the problems design reviews miss
- Influence and coach a distributed team of Data Engineers and Analytics Engineers, raising the quality bar through design and code review and scaling it by building the frameworks and automated checks other teams adopt
- Navigate conflicting stakeholder requirements across Infrastructure, Finance, Data Science, and Product Engineering, and land a single definition everyone can build on
- Identify and eliminate duplication and data fragmentation across the engineering organization, driving deprecation of what your models replace
- Participate in the team's on-call rotation for the datasets we own
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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