Senior Staff Data Engineer, Foundational Data
About the role
Senior technical leader responsible for defining and executing the long-term data architecture for Airbnb's foundational data assets, spanning cost, usage, and performance signals across infrastructure, AI tooling, and related datasets. Hands-on role integrating data engineering and analytics engineering to build scalable pipelines, models, and frameworks with broad cross-org impact.
Responsibilities
- 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
Qualifications
- 12+ years of relevant industry experience with a BS/Masters, or 9+ years with a PhD, in data engineering or a closely related field
- Designed, built, and operated production data pipelines at large scale, proficient in SQL and Python (Scala useful but not required)
- Ability to design a dimensional model and define a trusted metric, even if analytics engineering isn’t your job title
- Proven ability to move into unfamiliar data or technical domains and become productive quickly, modeling underlying systems effectively
- Experience as a technical lead on a team or program, setting direction while still writing code
- Experience writing multi-year technical strategy and securing cross-org funding and delivery
- Built a data product where no schema or precedent existed and drove adoption across teams
- Strong ability to align multiple teams on a contested technical decision and explain data models to both engineers and finance partners
Skills
Benefits
- Competitive pay range: $248,000—$310,000 USD
- Bonus eligibility, equity, benefits, and Employee Travel Credits (as applicable)
- Disability accommodations during recruitment process
- Remote-eligible role with potential occasional office/offsite participation
- Discretionary pay and benefits subject to company policy
About Airbnb
Book accommodations around the world.
Founded in August of 2008 and based in San Francisco, California, Airbnb is a trusted community marketplace for people to list, discover, and book unique accommodations around the world — online or from a mobile phone. Whether an apartment for a night, a castle for a week, or a villa for a month, Airbnb connects people to unique travel experiences, at any price point, in more than 33,000 cities and 192 countries. And with world-class customer service and a growing community of users, Airbnb is the easiest way for people to monetize their extra space and showcase it to an audience of millions. No global movement springs from individuals. It takes an entire team united behind something big. Together, we work hard, we laugh a lot, we brainstorm nonstop, we use hundreds of Post-Its a week, and we give the best high-fives in town. Headquartered in San Francisco, we have satellite offices in Dublin, London, Barcelona, Paris, Milan, Copenhagen, Berlin, Moscow, São Paolo, Sydney, and Singapore.
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