Senior Manager, Technical Program Management (Data, Reliability & Developer Experience)

airbnb, Inc.; Northern (KY); On-site; USD 232,000 - 282,000; Full time

Job summary

Airbnb is seeking a Senior Manager of Technical Program Management to lead a team across Data Infrastructure, Reliability Engineering, and Developer Experience. You will drive multi-org programs, shape technical direction, and partner with senior ICs to ensure robust, scalable platforms across the Airbnb ecosystem.

The role requires deep technical background, cross-org influence, and experience delivering AI-ready data platforms.

Qualifications

• 12+ years in technical program management, software engineering, or SRE, including 5+ years leading TPMs or managers of TPMs.
• Strong technical grounding in two or more areas: distributed data systems, Kubernetes/cloud infrastructure, observability, or CI/CD/build systems/monorepos.
• Track record leading multi-quarter, multi-team platform migrations or deprecations at scale.
• Self-motivated, proactive with the ability to align teams across organizations.
• Excellent business judgment, analytical skills, and ownership mindset.
• Experience delivering infrastructure for AI workloads and AI-assisted engineering.

Responsibilities

• Shape and influence the technical direction of projects with high stakeholder impact.
• Drive phased rollouts and large-scale platform migrations with clear exit criteria.
• Prioritize details while maintaining broad, outcome-driven thinking.
• Define measurable success criteria (availability, SLOs, latency, cost) and own outcomes.
• Maintain transparent communication with stakeholders and leadership.
• Hire, develop, and coach senior TPMs and set operating standards.
• Lead programs preparing infrastructure for AI-driven scale and AI-ready data platforms.
• Collaborate with engineering and finance on efficiency and cost-reduction programs.
• Drive cross-org reliability initiatives (SLOs, incident reviews, rollouts).
• Own infrastructure planning rhythms (OKRs, roadmaps, dependency mapping).

Skills

Leadership

Data infrastructure

SRE

Observability

CI/CD

Kubernetes

AI workloads

Platform migrations

Stakeholder management

Strategic planning

Tools

Spark

Trino

Flink/Kafka

Iceberg

Kubernetes

CI/CD tooling

Job description

Senior Manager, Technical Program Management (Data, Reliability & Developer Experience)

United States

Airbnb was born in 2007 when two hosts welcomed three guests to their San Francisco home, and has since grown to over 5 million hosts who have welcomed over 2 billion guest arrivals in almost every country across the globe. Every day, hosts offer unique stays and experiences that make it possible for guests to connect with communities in a more authentic way.

The Community You Will Join:

Airbnb's mission is to create a world where people can Belong Anywhere. As we grow to achieve that mission, we're looking to add a technical, hands-on, and mission-driven Senior Manager of Technical Program Management (TPM) for the Infrastructure TPM team. You will lead a team of TPMs driving multi-org programs across Data Infrastructure, Reliability Engineering, and Developer Experience.

• Data Infrastructure builds the batch, streaming, and real-time data and feature platforms, semantic metrics layer, and query engines that power analytics, experimentation, and ML, and is making the data stack AI-ready and cost-efficient at scale.
• Reliability Engineering provides the observability, alerting, incident response, and deployment-safety platforms (progressive delivery and automated rollback) that keep Airbnb highly available and resilient.
• Developer Experience scales the end-to-end developer workflow, including source control, CI, build, code review, deployment, and cloud development environments, so engineers and AI agents can ship quality software quickly and safely.

In this role, you will collaborate closely with data, infrastructure, and product teams across Airbnb to develop holistic solutions that ensure the Airbnb platform is robust, highly available, and transparent in its operations. You will partner closely with senior ICs and engineering directors across Airbnb on processes, strategy, and execution.

We are looking for a candidate with a robust technical background who deeply understands the problem space, drives requirements, and leverages their infrastructure engineering expertise to resolve strategic challenges that align with Airbnb’s larger goals.

The Difference You Will Make:

Our team of TPMs demonstrate ownership, apply skills in whatever combination necessary, and make order out of chaos to achieve the desired outcome. We work hard to ensure teams understand what they have to deliver and by when. We are responsible for aligning teams, identifying or highlighting dependencies, recognizing and resolving ambiguity, setting expectations, anticipating risk, identifying and removing roadblocks, and ensuring the desired business goals are achieved. We are looking for people who share our passion for tackling complexity head-on while building a world class team of Technical Program Managers.

A Typical Day:

• Shape and influence the technical direction of projects, ensuring we meet stakeholder needs while maintaining high-quality standards.
• Drive phased rollouts and large-scale platform migrations, from pilot through adoption to deprecation, with clear exit criteria and minimal disruption to product teams.
• Balance broad, outcome-driven thinking with attention to critical details, exercising sound judgment to prioritize where deep focus is necessary to ensure successful execution.
• Define and secure stakeholder alignment on clear, measurable success criteria, such as availability and SLOs, CI and merge latency, cost per workload, and adoption, and hold programs accountable to them.
• Regularly assess risks and opportunities, and devise proactive mitigation strategies to maintain momentum and project success.
• Maintain transparent and effective communication channels to keep stakeholders informed of progress, developments, and challenges.
• Expertly present outcomes and updates to senior leadership, clearly and comprehensively articulating trade-offs, risks, and emerging opportunities.
• Hire, develop, and coach a team of senior TPMs, and set operating standards for planning, execution, and portfolio reporting across Infrastructure.
• Lead programs that prepare infrastructure for AI-driven scale, from CI, source control, and merge systems that absorb higher change volume to agentic developer workflows and AI-ready data platforms.
• Partner with engineering and finance on infrastructure efficiency programs, including utilization, cost attribution, and workload-normalized cost reduction.
• Drive cross-org reliability programs such as incident review follow-through, SLO adoption, and deployment-safety rollouts.
• Own Infrastructure planning rhythms (OKRs, roadmap reviews, dependency mapping) across Data, Reliability, and Developer Experience.

Your Expertise:

• 12+ years in technical program management, software engineering, or SRE, including 5+ years leading and mentoring TPMs or managers of TPMs, creating a culture of inclusiveness and sustainability
• Demonstrated ability to work through ambiguity to detailed solutions. You can take a vague problem, crisply frame the challenge, identify a path forward, ramp up quickly on new technologies, and drive an initiative over the finish line.
• Strong technical grounding in at least two of: distributed data systems (Spark, Trino, Flink/Kafka, Iceberg), Kubernetes and cloud infrastructure, observability platforms, or CI/CD, build systems, and monorepos.
• Track record of leading multi-quarter, multi-team platform migrations or deprecations at scale.
• Self-motivated, proactive and proven ability to adapt well and work with teams having different operating cadences.
• Sound business judgment, a proven ability to influence others, strong analytical skills, and a track record of taking ownership, leading data driven analyses, and influencing results
• Experience delivering infrastructure for AI workloads or AI-assisted engineering, such as feature platforms, LLM gateways, agentic developer tooling, or scaling CI/CD for AI-generated code.
• Deep familiarity with progressive delivery, canary and automated rollback practices, SLOs and error budgets, and incident management.
• Excellent written and oral business communication and people skills, with the ability to influence stakeholders.

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 in order to submit an application, please contact us at: [e-mail] . Please include your full name, the role you’re applying for and the accommodation necessary to assist you with the recruiting process.

We ask that you only reach out to us if you are a candidate whose disability prevents you from being able to complete our online application.

Airbnb values diversity & belonging and is proud to be an Equal Employment Opportunity employer. All individuals seeking employment at Airbnb are considered without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, age, gender, sex, marital status, ancestry, physical or mental disability, veteran status, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, or any other legally protected characteristic.

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

$232,000 — $282,000 USD

Reasonable Accommodations: We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations throughout the recruitment process for applicants with disabilities. If you need assistance, or an accommodation, please let your recruiter know once you are contacted about a role.