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Staff Data Engineer, Enterprise Core Datasets, Tech Foundations

Airbnb· Tech Foundations
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San Francisco, CAfull-timePosted 4d ago

About the role

Staff Data Engineer responsible for leading the architecture, implementation, and operation of high-impact data pipelines and core datasets that underpin AI adoption metrics, unit economics, and enterprise application data at Airbnb.

Responsibilities

  • 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.

Qualifications

  • 9+ years of relevant industry experience with aBachelor’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.

Skills

Required:SQLPythonApache Spark
Nice to have:Scala

Benefits

  • Reasonable accommodations during recruitment process will be provided upon request.
Last updated Oct 22, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.
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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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