Engineering Manager, Airbnb
CS Data Services
$204-255k
More information about location
Community marketplace for holiday accomodation
Job no longer available
Community marketplace for holiday accomodation
1001+ employees
Job no longer available
$204-255k
More information about location
1001+ employees
Company mission
To create a world where anyone can belong anywhere.
Role
Who you are
- We’re looking for someone who thrives at the intersection of backend and platform engineering—combining strong technical judgment, creativity, and a passion for engaging with partners
- 9+ years of software engineering experience, with 3–5+ years managing engineering teams in a fast-paced environment; BS/MS in CS or a related field
- Deep understanding of distributed systems, application-layer APIs, and event-driven architectures
- Strong proficiency with Java/Kotlin, distributed queues (Kafka, SQS), GraphQL, data processing frameworks (Spark/Flink), and datastores (Redis, ElasticSearch, Cassandra, MySQL, or similar KV/relational systems)
- Demonstrated ability to balance long-term platform strategy with near-term product needs using sound technical judgment
- Proven track record building reliable, scalable, high-quality systems and fostering a culture of accountability and ownership
- Excellent communicator who can influence across teams and develop, motivate, and lead high-performing engineering organizations
- Experience delivering large, complex technical initiatives end-to-end
- Strong commitment to operational excellence, quality, reliability, and availability
- Passionate about creating exceptional experiences for both end-users and internal partners
What the job involves
- The Community Support Engineering (CSE) organization ensures our hosts and guests receive exceptional support throughout their entire Airbnb journey. We build world-class tools for agents, operations teams, and AI systems—keeping our global community supported 24/7, 365 days a year
- Within CSE, the CS Data Services team builds APIs, data services, and libraries that provide secure, permission-aware, and structured access to agent, customer, and case data. We power mission-critical use cases across product engineering, machine learning, data engineering, and operational tooling
- We are seeking an experienced Engineering Manager to lead the CS Data Services team. In this role, you will:
- Ramp up on the team’s technology, product, and business goals, including hands-on work to develop a deep technical understanding
- Lead, mentor, and grow a high-performing engineering team in a fast-paced environment
- Foster a team culture that emphasizes product thinking, technical depth, and customer-centric problem solving
- Drive adoption of data services by partnering closely with teams across CSE to understand their use cases and deliver intuitive, scalable solutions
- Set clear priorities and strategic direction in collaboration with engineering, product, machine learning, and data teams
- Improve team processes to strengthen collaboration, execution efficiency, and delivery quality
- Lead complex, cross-functional projects that align with business goals and deliver measurable impact
- Example Projects You Will Lead:
- Unity: AI Contextual Data Store: Unity today serves as the primary source of user, listing, and reservation context for AI Assistant, but operates on fragmented definitions, manual onboarding, and limited governance
- The initiative aims to evolve Unity into a canonical, metadata-rich, and fully governed contextual data platform that reliably powers every LLM-driven experience at Airbnb
- DMC Search: this project aims to introduce a dedicated indexing and retrieval engine that consolidates all case and expense signals into a consistent, searchable Elasticsearch model
- The system will deliver low-latency, scalable search capabilities through new ingestion pipelines and serving APIs that power all case list, global search, and expense views, serving ~5K users
- Collaborate with Staff+ engineers, TPMs, and cross-functional partners to define strategy and drive execution
- Review and provide feedback on system designs, API design, data-serving patterns, and architectural decisions
- Support the team in maintaining operational excellence, reliability, and continuous system improvements
- Lead discussions that tie technical work to product outcomes and business priorities
- Mentor engineers through coaching, career development, and a culture of ownership and curiosity
- Represent the team in planning forums, shaping org-wide platform strategy and long-term technical direction
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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