Staff Data Engineer — Enterprise Core Datasets (Remote)

Airbnb, Inc.; Oregon; Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Airbnb is looking for a Staff Data Engineer to lead data pipelines that measure AI adoption and costs, connect revenue with cost drivers, and integrate enterprise applications like Jira. You will shape the data foundation across petabyte-scale datasets, ensuring correctness, performance, and cost efficiency.

You will mentor engineers, drive architectural decisions, and contribute to Airbnb's data engineering standards, while balancing long-term system health with immediate delivery needs.

Qualifications

• 9+ years of relevant industry experience with a degree in CS/EE or equivalent; or 6+ years with a PhD.
• Proven record leading complex data engineering initiatives from ambiguity to production ownership.
• Deep expertise in SQL and strong Python or Scala programming, with well-tested data systems.
• Extensive experience with distributed processing technologies like Apache Spark and large-scale analytical storage.
• Strong data modeling skills including facts/dimensions, slowly changing dimensions, and historical data management.
• Experience integrating heterogeneous sources (APIs, enterprise apps, event data, transactional systems) with evolving schemas.
• Proven ability to build reliable pipelines and perform migrations/backfills preserving correctness.
• Experience in data quality controls, observability, lineage, governance, and incident recovery.

Responsibilities

• Lead architecture, implementation, and operation of high-impact data pipelines across AI usage, Unit Economics, and enterprise data.
• Partner with stakeholders to define AI adoption, usage, and spending metrics and build consistent data models.
• Evolve Unit Economics datasets to connect revenue and cost drivers for product profitability and efficiency.
• Build ingestion/transform pipelines for non-platform systems like Jira and other BizTech apps.
• Translate requirements into source contracts, reusable models, and technical designs.
• Develop configurable pipelines and shared components for onboarding new data sources and products.
• Establish automated testing, reconciliation, anomaly detection, and monitoring for data quality.
• Lead migrations and backfills with validation and controlled cutovers.

Skills

SQL

Python

Scala

Data modeling

Apache Spark

Data integration

Observability

Mentorship

Education

Bachelor's or Master's in CS/EE

PhD (optional)

Tools

Apache Iceberg

Workflow orchestration

SQL transformation frameworks

Job description

Airbnb is looking for a Staff Data Engineer to lead data pipelines that measure AI adoption and costs, connect revenue with cost drivers, and integrate enterprise applications like Jira. You will shape the data foundation across petabyte-scale datasets, ensuring correctness, performance, and cost efficiency.

You will mentor engineers, drive architectural decisions, and contribute to Airbnb's data engineering standards, while balancing long-term system health with immediate delivery needs.