Staff Data Engineer, Airbnb
Tech Foundations
Community marketplace for holiday accomodation
Be an early applicant
Community marketplace for holiday accomodation
1001+ employees
Be an early applicant
1001+ employees
Company mission
To create a world where anyone can belong anywhere.
Role
Who you are
- 9+ years of relevant industry experience with a Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience; or 6+ years of relevant experience with a PhD
- A track record of leading complex data engineering initiatives from ambiguous requirements through architecture, delivery, and sustained production ownership
- Deep expertise in SQL and strong programming skills in Python or Scala, with experience building maintainable, well-tested data systems
- Extensive experience with distributed processing technologies such as Apache Spark and large-scale analytical storage systems
- Strong data modeling skills, including fact and dimension design, slowly changing dimensions, incremental processing, and historical data management
- Experience integrating heterogeneous sources, including APIs, enterprise applications, event data, and transactional systems, while managing schema changes and source reliability
- Proven ability to build reliable pipelines and execute migrations and backfills while preserving correctness and downstream compatibility
- Experience establishing data quality controls, observability, lineage, governance, and effective incident recovery practices
- Strong performance engineering skills, including diagnosing bottlenecks and optimizing distributed computation, storage, and query execution
- The ability to align stakeholders across engineering and business functions, communicate architectural tradeoffs, and drive decisions across team boundaries
- Demonstrated technical leadership through mentorship, architectural guidance, and improvements to shared engineering practices
- Curiosity and sound judgment when learning new domains and balancing immediate delivery needs with long-term system health
- Experience with AI usage or cost measurement, cloud cost attribution, Unit Economics, enterprise application data, or financial and payments datasets is a plus. Familiarity with workflow orchestration, SQL transformation frameworks, and modern table formats such as Apache Iceberg is also valuable
What the job involves
- Lead the architecture, implementation, and operation of high-impact data pipelines across AI usage and cost, Unit Economics, enterprise applications, and critical Financial metrics
- Partner with stakeholders to define how AI adoption, consumption, and spending are measured across the organization, and build consistent data models that support those definitions
- Evolve Unit Economics datasets to connect revenue and diverse cost drivers, enabling teams to understand product profitability and resource efficiency
- Build reliable ingestion and transformation pipelines for non-platform systems such as Jira and other BizTech enterprise applications
- Translate ambiguous requirements into clear source contracts, reusable fact and dimension models, and technical designs
- Develop configurable pipelines and shared components that simplify onboarding new data sources, products, and business requirements
- Establish automated testing, reconciliation, anomaly detection, and monitoring to protect data accuracy, completeness, and availability
- Lead safe migrations and historical backfills through dependency analysis, validation, controlled cutovers, and recovery planning
- Optimize distributed processing, storage, and query performance to improve freshness and reduce compute costs
- Own production reliability through on-call participation, incident response, and lasting improvements to systems and runbooks
- Shape the technical roadmap, lead design reviews, mentor engineers, and contribute improvements to Airbnb’s Data Engineering Paved Path
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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