Engineering Manager, Marketing Technology

at Airbnb

📍 United States

USD 212,000-265,000 per year

MIDDLE

✅ Remote

Tech Stack
Tag name is followed by "@" symbol and proficiency level value. About proficiency levels:

1-2 — basic awareness. Minimal hands-on experience, and a rudimentary understanding of the technology's purpose;

3-6 — daily use. Comfortable and regular usage, capable of handling common tasks and challenges related to the technology;

7-9 — you are an expert, you can teach others, you know all the pitfalls and tricks;

10 — exceptional knowledge, comprehensive understanding, and adeptness in all aspects of the technology, including advanced problem-solving. Think twice before claiming or demanding such level.

AI @ 3 Agentic Systems @ 3 CI/CD Data Engineering Distributed Systems @ 6 Engineering Management @ 5 Kafka @ 6 LLM @ 3 Machine Learning Marketing @ 3 Observability @ 3

Details

Airbnb's Marketing Technology organization builds infrastructure for audience segmentation, campaign orchestration, message delivery, and real-time insights across email, SMS, push, and WhatsApp. The Engineering Manager will lead the Orchestration and Delivery teams, which own Airbnb's communications platform end to end.

The Orchestration team builds systems for personalized, event- and list-triggered customer journeys. The Delivery team owns notification routing, terminal-state tracking, contact preferences, and messaging vendor relationships. The teams collaborate with audience segmentation, content, machine learning, data engineering, and product teams.

The platform is undergoing a transformation involving unified messaging flows, business-impact monitoring, end-to-end observability, campaign delivery SLAs, health-gated ramping, dynamic pacing, provider failover, and agentic capabilities such as agent-driven orchestration, lifecycle testing agents, smart notification scheduling, and AI-assisted on-call triage.

Responsibilities

Lead planning, roadmap reviews, and cross-team synchronization for the Delivery and Orchestration teams.
Manage engineers across both teams, focusing on career growth, technical development, and blocker removal.
Serve as the primary engineering contact for cross-team dependencies and make prioritization decisions.
Partner with the Product Manager on roadmaps covering journey orchestration, bulk campaign sends, and delivery infrastructure.
Drive technical strategy for end-to-end observability and SLA-driven delivery, including campaign-level delivery tracking, health-gated ramping, dynamic pacing against budgets, and automatic provider failover.
Oversee the design, delivery, and operational health of production agentic systems, including agent-driven orchestration, lifecycle testing agents, smart scheduling, and LLM-assisted on-call triage.
Champion AI-native development practices, including AI-assisted coding and review, agents in CI/CD, on-call response, and delivery anomaly detection.
Own operational maturity across both teams, including daytime and 24/7 on-call programs, blameless incident retrospectives, SLO definitions, runbook quality, and third-party messaging vendor escalations.
Represent the communications platform in organization-wide planning and contribute to Marketing Technology engineering strategy.

Requirements

Required

5+ years of software engineering experience and 4+ years in an engineering management role leading platform or infrastructure teams.
An AI-native engineering mindset, including daily use of AI tools and experience leading teams in adopting AI-assisted development.
Experience leading teams that have designed, built, and operated production-grade agentic systems, such as autonomous or semi-autonomous agent pipelines, LLM-orchestrated workflows, or multi-agent architectures handling production traffic.
Strong technical foundation in high-throughput distributed systems, event-driven architectures, message queues and streaming such as Kafka, workflow orchestration engines such as Temporal, and multi-provider integrations.
Experience operating reliable, customer-facing production services with defined SLOs, on-call programs, incident management, and operational excellence.
Experience managing engineers across different seniority levels, including early-career engineers, with demonstrated career growth outcomes.
Experience managing cross-team platform relationships, inbound dependencies, priorities, and commitments.
Experience delivering complex, multi-quarter technical roadmaps, including large-scale migrations or legacy system consolidations.

Preferred

Experience with notification, messaging, or communications infrastructure at scale, including email, SMS, push, or WhatsApp delivery.
Experience with customer journey orchestration, marketing automation, or lifecycle messaging platforms.
Familiarity with agent frameworks and orchestration tooling such as LangGraph, CrewAI, Autogen, or Temporal, and knowledge of their production limitations.
Experience building end-to-end observability and business-impact alerting for multi-hop asynchronous pipelines.
Experience managing teams with 24/7 on-call rotations and production services involving external SLAs or vendor dependencies.

Location and Work Policy

This role is eligible for remote work within the United States. Employees may optionally use any Airbnb US office location. Team members are expected to be available during core collaboration hours in their time zone and participate in occasional onsite gatherings, typically two to four times per year.

Benefits

The role may be eligible for bonus, equity, benefits, and Employee Travel Credits. Airbnb is committed to inclusion, belonging, and providing reasonable accommodations throughout the recruitment process.