Remote Engineering Manager – AI-Powered Messaging Platform

Airbnb, Inc.; United States; Remote; USD 212,000 - 265,000; Full time

Job summary

Airbnb, Inc. is seeking an Engineering Manager for Marketing Technology to lead two teams that own the communications platform end to end.

You will set technical direction, own roadmap execution, and foster AI-native engineering practices to deliver reliable messaging at scale. The role requires 5+ years in software Eng and 4+ years in management, with experience in agentic systems, distributed architecture, and 24/7 on-call operations.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of software engineering experience, with 4+ years in an engineering management role leading platform or infrastructure teams
• Demonstrated AI-native engineering mindset — you use AI tools daily in your own work, have led teams in genuinely adopting AI-assisted development, and have strong opinions about where agents add real leverage vs. hype
• Experience leading teams that have designed, built, and operated production-grade agentic systems — autonomous or semi-autonomous agent pipelines, LLM-orchestrated workflows, or multi-agent architectures handling real production traffic
• Strong technical foundation in high-throughput distributed systems: event-driven architectures, message queues and streaming (Kafka or similar), workflow orchestration engines (Temporal or similar), and multi-provider integrations — able to engage credibly in architecture and design conversations
• Track record of running reliable, customer-facing production services with defined SLOs, including on-call programs, incident management, and operational excellence across teams of varying size and seniority
• Demonstrated experience managing engineers across a range of seniority levels, including early-career engineers, with a track record of meaningful career growth outcomes
• Experience owning cross-team platform relationships: managing inbound dependency requests, negotiating priorities, and communicating commitments with confidence
• Track record of delivering complex, multi-quarter technical roadmaps — including large-scale migrations or legacy system consolidations — in fast-moving environments

Responsibilities

• Lead planning, roadmap reviews, and cross-team syncs for Delivery and Orchestration, keeping delivery on track and stakeholders well-informed
• Run 1:1s with engineers across both teams, with intentional focus on career growth, technical skill development, and early identification of blockers
• Serve as the primary engineering point of contact for cross-team dependencies — fielding requests from product teams across Airbnb and making clear, reasoned prioritization calls
• Partner with the Product Manager to sequence the roadmap across journey orchestration, bulk campaign sends, and delivery infrastructure
• Drive technical strategy for end-to-end observability and SLA-driven delivery: 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: agent-driven orchestration, lifecycle testing agents, smart scheduling, and LLM-assisted on-call triage
• Champion AI-native development practices across both teams — from AI-assisted coding and review to agents in CI/CD, on-call response, and delivery anomaly detection
• Own the health and operational maturity of both teams: 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 org-wide planning cycles and contribute to the broader Marketing Technology engineering strategy

Skills

Software engineering

AI-native engineering

Production services

Distributed systems

On-call experience

Cross-team leadership

Tools

Kafka

Temporal

LLM tooling

Job description

Airbnb, Inc. is seeking an Engineering Manager for Marketing Technology to lead two teams that own the communications platform end to end.

You will set technical direction, own roadmap execution, and foster AI-native engineering practices to deliver reliable messaging at scale. The role requires 5+ years in software Eng and 4+ years in management, with experience in agentic systems, distributed architecture, and 24/7 on-call operations.