[Hiring] Senior Staff Data Engineer @Airbnb

Role Description

As a Senior Staff Data Engineer, you are the technical leader for this team and the person who sets its direction. This is a hands-on role with no direct reports: you will own the long-term data architecture and you will build against it, from the Airflow-orchestrated pipelines that ingest telemetry, logs, and billing data through to the dimensional models and Minerva definitions that thousands of people at Airbnb reason with.

• 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.
• You have designed, built, and operated production data pipelines at large scale, and you write strong SQL and Python. Scala experience is useful but not required.
• You can design a dimensional model and define a metric others will trust, even if analytics engineering has not been your job title.
• You have moved into an unfamiliar data or technical domain and become productive quickly, building enough understanding of the underlying systems to model them well.
• You have been the technical lead on a team or program, setting direction that other senior engineers executed against without formal authority over them, while still writing code yourself.
• You have written the multi-year technical strategy for an area, and got other organizations to fund and deliver against it.
• You have built a data product where no schema or precedent existed, and persuaded other teams to adopt it.
• You have written the document that aligned several teams on a contested technical decision, and you can explain a data model to a finance partner as readily as to an engineer.

Location

This position is completely Remote - USA. The role may include occasional work at an Airbnb office or attendance at offsites, as agreed to with your manager. While the position is Remote Eligible, you must live in a state where Airbnb, Inc. has a registered entity.

Our Commitment To Inclusion & Belonging

Airbnb is committed to working with the broadest talent pool possible. We believe diverse ideas foster innovation and engagement, and allow us to attract creatively-led people, and to develop the best products, services and solutions. All qualified individuals are encouraged to apply.

Equal Employment Opportunity

Airbnb values diversity & belonging and is proud to be an Equal Employment Opportunity employer. All individuals seeking employment at Airbnb are considered without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, age, gender, sex, marital status, ancestry, physical or mental disability, veteran status, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, or any other legally protected characteristic.

How We'll Take Care of You

Our job titles may span more than one career level. The actual base pay is dependent upon many factors, such as: training, transferable skills, work experience, business needs and market demands. The base pay range is subject to change and may be modified in the future. This role may also be eligible for bonus, equity, benefits, and Employee Travel Credits.

• Pay Range: $248,000 — $310,000 USD