Senior Staff Data Engineer, Foundational Data

Details

The Foundational Data team builds and operates high-quality, widely reused datasets that power critical decisions across Airbnb, including site traffic measurement, bot traffic classification, cloud cost attribution, and AI cost, usage, and performance measurement. The team is a mix of Data Engineers and Analytics Engineers working within Cloud Infrastructure.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role with no direct reports. You will own the long-term data architecture and build Airflow-orchestrated pipelines that ingest telemetry, logs, and billing data, as well as dimensional models and Minerva definitions used across Airbnb. You will work across data engineering and analytics engineering, setting direction for infrastructure intelligence and AI measurement datasets.

Responsibilities

• Provide technical leadership across data engineering and analytics engineering work spanning cloud cost, traffic and bots, and infrastructure intelligence.
• Define and own the multi-year data strategy and architecture for Airbnb's foundational data assets.
• Build cross-organizational consensus to fund and execute the data strategy.
• Own how Airbnb measures AI, including the unit economics of training and serving models, GPU fleet utilization, and the cost and adoption of developer AI tooling.
• Design and build datasets integrating cost, utilization, performance, and reliability signals across Airbnb's infrastructure fleets.
• Stay hands-on in the pipelines and models you architect.
• Influence and coach distributed Data Engineers and Analytics Engineers through design and code reviews.
• Build frameworks and automated checks that other teams can adopt.
• Navigate stakeholder requirements across Infrastructure, Finance, Data Science, and Product Engineering.
• Establish shared definitions and drive adoption of new data models.
• Identify and eliminate duplication and data fragmentation across the engineering organization.
• Participate in the on-call rotation for owned datasets.

Requirements

• 12+ years of relevant industry experience with a bachelor's or master's degree, or 9+ years with a PhD, in data engineering or a closely related field.
• Experience designing, building, and operating production data pipelines at large scale.
• Strong SQL and Python skills.
• Scala experience is useful but not required.
• Ability to design dimensional models and define trusted metrics.
• Ability to become productive quickly in unfamiliar data or technical domains and model the underlying systems effectively.
• Experience serving as a technical lead for a team or program, setting direction without formal authority while continuing to write code.
• Experience writing multi-year technical strategies and securing organizational funding and execution.
• Experience building data products where no schema or precedent existed and persuading other teams to adopt them.
• Experience aligning multiple teams on contested technical decisions and explaining data models to both finance partners and engineers.

Location

This position is completely remote in the United States and is US remote eligible. Occasional work at an Airbnb office or attendance at offsites may be required as agreed with the manager. Employees must live in an approved state where the applicable Airbnb entity has a registered entity. Approved remote states listed in the posting include Alabama, California, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Minnesota, Mississippi, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, and Washington.

Benefits

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

Compensation

The base pay range is $248,000–$310,000 USD per year.