Engineering Manager, Workflow Orchestration

Traveltechessentialist; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 212,000 - 265,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Bonus

Equity

Employee Travel Credits

Job summary

Traveltechessentialist is seeking an Engineering Manager for the Workflow Orchestration team to lead the design and implementation of distributed systems that manage complex data workflows. The successful candidate will have over 5 years of experience in engineering leadership and distributed systems.

This role offers an opportunity to drive strategy for orchestration, collaborate across teams, and ensure operational excellence while working in a US remote eligible capacity with flexible office attendance.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of engineering leadership experience managing distributed systems teams.
• Strong technical background in distributed systems and workflow orchestration.
• Familiarity with software engineering principles and design patterns.

Responsibilities

• Lead a high-performing team responsible for orchestration infrastructure.
• Define the technical vision and roadmap for orchestration.
• Drive workflow paradigms and tooling for consistency and performance.

Skills

Engineering leadership

Distributed systems

Workflow orchestration

Communication skills

Tools

Apache Airflow

Dagster

Flyte

Prefect

Kubeflow

Maestro

Job description

The Community You Will Join

You will join the Workflow Orchestration team within Airbnb's Data Infrastructure org. This team owns the orchestration layer that coordinates, executes, and monitors complex data workflows across batch and streaming domains. Our mission is to empower data engineers, ML teams, analytics, and operational applications with robust, scalable, and observable orchestration platforms and tooling — ensuring that critical business workflows run reliably, efficiently, and transparently.

The Difference You Will Make

As an Engineering Manager on the Workflow Orchestration team, you will:

• Lead and grow a high-performing team responsible for designing, implementing, and operating distributed orchestration infrastructure that runs tens of thousands of data workflows daily.
• Define the long-term technical vision and roadmap for orchestration, aligning to Airbnb's broader Data Infrastructure and Analytics platform strategy.
• Drive adoption of best-in-class workflow paradigms and tooling across data engineering, reliability, and ML teams, ensuring consistency, performance, and operational excellence.
• Partner closely with cross-functional teams in Data Platform, Compute, Storage, Analytics, and ML Infrastructure to integrate orchestration capabilities into wider data ecosystems.
• Coach and mentor engineers, enabling strong technical judgment, clarity of thinking, and ownership across the team.

A Typical Day

• Collaborate with senior engineering leaders to shape multi-year strategies for workflow orchestration and execution platforms.
• Stay connected to architectural decisions, review designs, and help unblock technical challenges.
• Partner with product and engineering leaders across Data Infrastructure to prioritize investments that balance reliability, developer experience, and cost.
• Ensure the team practices strong delivery discipline, operational monitoring, and on-call readiness for critical orchestration infrastructure.
• Stay up to date with emerging technologies, best practices, and industry trends in data engineering and software development.
• Recruit top engineering talent and grow the careers of engineers, with a focus on inclusive leadership and psychological safety.

What You'll Need

• 5+ years of engineering leadership experience managing and scaling distributed systems teams.
• Strong technical background in distributed systems, workflow orchestration engines, scheduling systems, or data infrastructure tooling.
• Previous working experience in large scale orchestration frameworks such as Apache Airflow, Dagster, Flyte, Prefect, Kubeflow, Maestro or similar platforms, and understanding of challenges around scaling, observability, and multi-tenancy.
• Strong familiarity with software engineering principles, including object-oriented and functional programming paradigms, design patterns, and code quality practices.
• A track record of partnering across engineering, product, and cross‑functional teams to deliver reliable, high-quality infrastructure at scale.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, especially in synthesizing complex technical concepts for broad audiences.

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. You must live in a state where Airbnb, Inc. has a registered entity.

Our Commitment to Inclusion & Belonging

Airbnb is committed to working with the broadest talent pool possible. We believe diverse ideas foster innovation and engagement, and allow us to attract creatively‑led people, and to develop the best products, services and solutions. All qualified individuals are encouraged to apply.

We strive to also provide a disability inclusive application and interview process. If you are a candidate with a disability and require reasonable accommodation, please contact [e-mail].

How We'll Take Care of You:

Our job titles may span more than one career level. The actual base pay is dependent upon many factors, such as: training, transferable skills, work experience, business needs and market demands. The base pay range is subject to change and may be modified in the future. This role may also be eligible for bonus, equity, benefits, and Employee Travel Credits.

Pay Range

$212,000 — $265,000 USD