Engineering Manager, CS Data Services

Details

Airbnb was born in 2007 when two hosts welcomed three guests to their San Francisco home, and has since grown to over 5 million hosts who have welcomed over 2 billion guest arrivals in almost every country across the globe. Every day, hosts offer unique stays and experiences that make it possible for guests to connect with communities in a more authentic way.

The Community You Will Join

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.

Responsibilities

• 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.
• 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.
• Represent the team in planning forums, shaping org-wide platform strategy and long-term technical direction.

Example Projects

• Unity: AI Contextual Data Store — evolve Unity into a canonical, metadata-rich, and fully governed contextual data platform that reliably powers LLM-driven experiences and the AI Assistant.
• DMC Search — introduce a dedicated indexing and retrieval engine consolidating case and expense signals into a consistent, searchable Elasticsearch model with new ingestion pipelines and serving APIs that power case list, global search, and expense views (serving ~5K users).

Requirements / Your Expertise

• 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 and experience with distributed queues (Kafka, SQS).
• Experience with GraphQL, data processing frameworks (Spark, Flink), and datastores such as 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 and a strong commitment to operational excellence, quality, reliability, and availability.
• Passionate about creating exceptional experiences for both end-users and internal partners.

Your Location

This position is US - Remote Eligible. 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. If your position is employed by another Airbnb entity, your recruiter will inform you what states you are eligible to work from.

How We'll Take Care of You

• Job titles may span more than one career level; actual base pay depends on factors such as training, transferable skills, work experience, business needs and market demands.
• This role may be eligible for bonus, equity, benefits, and Employee Travel Credits.

Pay Range

$204,000—$255,000 USD

Inclusion & Accessibility

Airbnb is committed to working with the broadest talent pool possible. We strive to provide a disability inclusive application and interview process and will consider reasonable accommodations on request ([email protected]).