Senior Systems Engineer Tech Foundations

Details

Airbnb's Content Products team, within the BizTech organization, delivers technology that supports Airbnb's knowledge culture, employee connection, and community support. Its platforms power Guest and Host support experiences in the Help Center and Resource Center, the Knowledge Center for support ambassadors, and One Airbnb for employees.

As a Senior Systems Engineer, you will build systems that power content management, including advanced authoring capabilities, content workflows, quality-improving analytics, compliance auditing, and AI-assisted experiences for writers. You will own major projects spanning multiple workstreams, potentially lead a pod of two to three engineers, and collaborate with product, engineering, and content teams.

Responsibilities

• Deliver major projects end to end across the software development lifecycle, including project planning, work breakdown, and leadership of small engineering pods.
• Partner with content, product, and engineering teams to map and improve authoring workflows, translate them into technical requirements, and deliver reporting, product integrations, and AI-assisted authoring and editing capabilities.
• Share technical ownership of Contentstack, Airbnb's enterprise headless CMS.
• Extend Contentstack with custom UI extensions and React authoring applications that follow Airbnb's Design Language System.
• Build integrations that provide structured taxonomy and knowledge graph capabilities for support and knowledge surfaces.
• Improve content organization, security, and discoverability through taxonomies, controlled vocabularies, and metadata standards.
• Design systems for reliability, security, maintainability, and observability; identify potential failure modes; participate in incident response; and implement corrective actions.
• Identify and deprecate or improve low-quality code, services, and frameworks, and plan quality improvements into the team roadmap.
• Provide constructive input through technical design and code reviews.
• Document technical solutions, including benefits, risks, and tradeoffs, and incorporate peer feedback.
• Analyze data, form hypotheses, experiment, and iterate to improve content authoring and delivery.
• Coach and mentor engineers, provide actionable feedback, support onboarding, and contribute to interviewing and Airbnb's technical community.
• Direct AI agents to explore unfamiliar systems, prototype solutions, generate and review code, and validate changes while remaining accountable for correctness and quality.

Requirements

• 5+ years of experience designing and implementing complex systems end to end in integrated enterprise environments.
• Experience building and maintaining custom author-facing tools, workflows, automations, and integrations in an enterprise headless CMS; Contentstack experience is preferred.
• Experience owning delivery for projects spanning multiple workstreams, including ambiguously defined projects.
• Strong front-end and back-end development experience, preferably with TypeScript, React, and Node.js.
• Strong working knowledge of large-scale content data analysis, bulk updates, and reporting, including efficient processing of large data volumes.
• Experience building and operating high-performance, scalable, fault-tolerant internal tooling and designing for failure modes and operational requirements.
• Fluency with agentic development workflows and sound judgment about when to trust and verify AI-generated output.
• Clear technical writing skills and experience creating design documents that explain benefits, risks, and tradeoffs.
• Experience mentoring engineers and giving actionable feedback.
• Ability to navigate ambiguity and help shape problem definitions.
• Ability to drive alignment, manage projects, and collaborate with technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with structured data in enterprise taxonomy or knowledge graph platforms.
• Familiarity with architectural patterns for large-scale web applications, including well-designed APIs, high-volume data pipelines, and efficient algorithms.
• Experience with reporting or analytics platforms such as Tableau or Grafana.
• BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Science or a related field.

Location

This position is US remote eligible. The role may include occasional work at an Airbnb office or attendance at offsites, as agreed with the manager. Candidates must live in a state where Airbnb, Inc. has a registered entity.

Compensation

The base pay range is $164,000–$193,000 USD. The role may also be eligible for bonus, equity, benefits, and Employee Travel Credits.

Inclusion and Accommodations

Airbnb is committed to inclusion and belonging, equal employment opportunity, and a disability-inclusive application and interview process. Reasonable accommodations are available for candidates with disabilities.