Programs Operations Lead, Airbnb
Growth Levers
$156-193k
3 days a week in office
Community marketplace for holiday accomodation
Be an early applicant
Community marketplace for holiday accomodation
1001+ employees
Be an early applicant
$156-193k
3 days a week in office
1001+ employees
Company mission
To create a world where anyone can belong anywhere.
Role
Who you are
- 12+ years in program management, business operations, or marketing/GTM operations — ideally orchestrating growth, marketing, or commercial programs across multiple markets in a marketplace, e-commerce, or consumer-tech environment
- A proven track record establishing a new operating system or central coordination capability from scratch — intake, prioritization, RACI, cadence, and governance — and scaling it across many teams and geographies
- Exceptional cross-functional orchestration in a heavily matrixed org — you create clarity where ownership is split across product, growth marketing, merchandising, finance, and regional and country operations, and you are a trusted partner to senior leaders up to the executive level
- Strong operating discipline — cross-workstream roadmaps, change-intake and sequencing, conflict resolution, launch management, business reviews and executive reporting, and crisp written communication that keeps distributed teams aligned
- Budget-to-execution fluency — comfortable translating multi-million-dollar budget decisions into roadmap and resourcing changes, and reporting spend and return to leadership
- Analytical fluency — you partner with analytics and finance on performance, efficiency, and incrementality, set consistent measurement standards, and are comfortable in the numbers (SQL familiarity a plus)
- Thrives in ambiguity and transition — comfortable operating while ownership models are still forming, with a strong bias to action, ownership, and ruthless prioritization
- Desirable: hands-on experience with one or more growth levers — incentives, promotions and coupons, host-funded offers, lifecycle/CRM, merchandising, or partnerships — and experience across international markets and time zones. Fluent written and spoken English; expected in office ~3 days per week
- Due to the nature of this position, the successful applicant will need to be based in San Francisco, CA to be able to conduct their work. If your position is employed by another Airbnb entity, your recruiter will inform you what states you are eligible to work from
What the job involves
- The Chief Business Officer (CBO) organization drives Airbnb's growth and expansion around the world — commercializing our new and existing businesses and executing our global strategy in the market
- The Global Markets team sits within CBO and makes sure Airbnb is locally relevant everywhere we operate, helping regions plan and execute growth across supply, demand, and the surfaces our communities use
- Local growth levers are one of the fastest-growing parts of that toolkit — guest incentives, host-funded promotions, engagement and CRM, country partnerships, and promotional merchandising
- Over the past year we've taken these from pilots to scaled programs including incentives, host-funded promotions and promotional-merchandising
- That momentum has outpaced our operating model — execution is spread across regional pods, central growth marketing, product, merchandising, and finance, with parallel roadmaps and no single source of truth
- We're building a dedicated program management capability to bring it all together, and we want you at the center of it
- This role requires candidates to be based in San Francisco. This role is not expected to be eligible for relocation support
- As the Program Operations Lead for Growth Levers, you own the operating system that turns our fast-growing portfolio of levers into coordinated, on-time execution
- You bring incentives, host-funded promotions, engagement and CRM, partnerships, and merchandising onto one roadmap, one source of truth, and one operating rhythm — so that product, growth marketing, merchandising, finance, and regional and country operations always know what is shipping, who owns it, when, and what it costs
- This is deliberately an execution and coordination role, distinct from the business and strategy roles around it
- The lever business owners (regional pods and individual lever DRIs) own their outcomes; the growth-levers playbook and country-planning lead defines what each lever is and how countries should deploy it; central growth marketing, product, and merchandising build the platforms
- You own the connective tissue between them — the intake, sequencing, operating cadence, budget-to-roadmap translation, launch governance, and institutional knowledge that make the whole portfolio executable at scale and keep it running when individual owners are away
- A typical day:
- Own one cross-lever roadmap and source of truth — consolidating incentives, host-funded promotions, engagement and CRM, partnerships, and merchandising campaigns across all regions into a single plan
- Build and run the levers operating system — the cadence, launch readiness, and clear RACI across Global Markets, central growth marketing, product, and finance, with resourcing gaps surfaced early
- Set up the change-intake and sequencing process — a consolidated intake process for new campaign and lever requests, with clear rules for prioritization, approval, and conflict resolution when campaigns overlap (for example, competing merchandising or incentive placements in the same market and week)
- Translate budget into an executable plan — track committed versus available spend across levers and markets, turn funding decisions into roadmap changes quickly, and give leadership a live view of where the money is going and what it is returning
- Be the connective tissue across a fragmented ownership map — regional business operations, growth marketing, partnerships, and the central product and merchandising teams — driving alignment and unblocking decisions so there is one conversation, not many
- Turn the levers playbooks and country plans into shipped campaigns — partnering with the playbook and country-planning owners to convert their strategy into standardized templates, coupon and efficiency-reference (ERF) libraries, launch checklists, and repeatable operations that scale across markets
- Make performance legible — partner with Advanced Analytics and FP&A on consistent tracking, post-mortems, and readouts that feed the learning agenda (efficiency, incrementality, seasonality, auto-apply, spotlights) and standardize what good looks like across regions
- Own the Global Markets reporting cadence — assemble and steer the Weekly Business Review (WBR) with the RDs, drive the weekly leadership report and the monthly country-performance newsletter, coordinate the team staff meeting, and prepare executive and country-deep-dive reviews — so leadership always has one accurate, current picture of the business and the levers
- Run the recurring cross-functional roadmap syncs that keep Global Markets aligned — with payments, advanced analytics, growth marketing, merchandising, and international product — turning roadmap changes, guardrails, and escalations into clear decisions and next steps
- Hold the operating system together through peak seasons and leadership absences — keeping the levers and the reporting cadence moving over the summer and other periods when business owners are out, so nothing depends on any one person
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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