Staff Backend Engineer - Ads Platform

Details

The Ads Platform team builds the AI-powered growth engine behind Airbnb's paid marketing across Google, Meta, and the broader advertising ecosystem. The platform powers paid campaigns across creative, optimization, and audience management at scale, with a strong commitment to brand safety, quality, and human oversight.

The Staff Software Engineer will lead the technical strategy and hands-on execution of Airbnb's next-generation, AI-powered Growth Engine for paid channels. The role will architect systems that autonomously manage the full lifecycle of paid campaigns, including creative generation and rotation, bidding and budget optimization, audience management, and feed intelligence.

Responsibilities

• Set technical direction for the agentic Growth Engine, including architecture decisions for systems that generate creatives, optimize bids and budgets, and manage audiences across Google, Meta, and other paid channels.
• Write and review code hands-on, establishing engineering standards for quality, availability, and system health across the platform.
• Partner with Marketing, Product, and Design to translate growth objectives into platform capabilities and define human-in-the-loop controls for safe, on-brand autonomous campaigns.
• Advance the AI-assisted → agentic → autonomous roadmap by identifying opportunities for automation, experimentation, and staged rollout.
• Mentor engineers and provide technical guidance through design reviews and collaborative, inclusive teamwork.
• Collaborate with ML/AI and data platform teams on models and signals that support campaign optimization.
• Integrate deeply with the Airbnb product to understand the customer journey.

Requirements

• 9+ years of experience in a hands-on software engineering role.
• Bachelor's and/or Master's degree, preferably in Computer Science, or equivalent experience.
• Hands-on technical leadership experience, including leading project teams, setting technical direction and strategy, and mentoring engineers.
• Strong focus on efficiency, availability, technical quality, and system quality.
• Experience defining product and technical strategy and driving alignment with cross-functional leaders and stakeholders.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills, including experience driving initiatives across teams, departments, and leadership.
• Experience fostering a collaborative and inclusive team environment.
• Bonus: Hands-on experience with paid advertising platforms such as Meta or Google.

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.

Benefits

The role may be eligible for bonus, equity, benefits, and Employee Travel Credits. Airbnb is committed to inclusion and belonging and provides a disability-inclusive application and interview process.