Staff Data Engineer, Tech Foundations

Airbnb; San Francisco (CA); Remote; USD 180,000 - 250,000; Full time

Job summary

Airbnb is seeking a Staff Data Engineer to lead enterprise core datasets and data foundations. You will steer architecture, build scalable pipelines, and collaborate with cross‑functional teams to measure AI usage, unit economics, and financial metrics.

You will mentor engineers, improve data quality, and drive efficiency while shaping the data platform strategy for the company’s most critical datasets.

Qualifications

• 9+ years of data engineering experience with relevant education or equivalent
• Proven track record leading complex data initiatives through architecture to production
• Strong SQL and programming in Python or Scala and well-tested data systems

Responsibilities

• Lead architecture, implementation and operation of high‑impact data pipelines across datasets
• Define data models and source contracts for consistency and reliability
• Mentor engineers and contribute to shared data engineering standards

Skills

SQL

Python/Scala

Distributed systems

Data modeling

Education

Bachelor's/Master's in CS

Tools

Apache Spark

Apache Iceberg

Job description

Staff Data Engineer, Enterprise Core Datasets, Tech Foundations

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

At Airbnb, trustworthy data powers business decisions, product innovation, and operational efficiency. The Enterprise Core Datasets team builds the technical data foundations that help Airbnb understand how the business operates, where resources are invested, and how new technologies create value. Our scope spans high-impact datasets across the organization: measuring AI adoption, usage, and cost; understanding revenue, costs, and profitability through Unit Economics; integrating non-platform data from Jira and other enterprise applications; and powering critical company metrics such as Gross Booking Value and Revenue. You will join a team that values thoughtful architecture, engineering rigor, and operational ownership. We collaborate with engineering, product, analytics, finance, and business teams to turn complex requirements into dependable, reusable data assets. We welcome strong engineers who are curious about the business and eager to solve problems across diverse domains.

The Difference You Will Make

As a Staff Data Engineer, you will provide hands‑on technical leadership for datasets that shape decisions across Airbnb. Your work will help the organization measure AI adoption and spending, understand the economics of its products, and connect enterprise application data to meaningful business and operational insights. You will lead complex initiatives from problem definition and architectural design through implementation, validation, and production operations. You will build extensible data foundations that accommodate new AI tools, products, cost categories, and enterprise systems while maintaining clear definitions, traceability, and reliable historical data. Operating in an ecosystem that includes petabyte‑scale datasets, you will improve correctness, freshness, performance, and cost efficiency. You will develop reusable frameworks that simplify source onboarding, reduce duplicated logic, and make critical data easier to discover and use. Through mentorship and contributions to Airbnb’s shared data engineering tools and standards, your impact will extend across the data community.

A Typical Day

• Lead the architecture, implementation, and operation of high‑impact data pipelines across AI usage and cost, Unit Economics, enterprise applications, and critical Financial metrics.
• Partner with stakeholders to define how AI adoption, consumption, and spending are measured across the organization, and build consistent data models that support those definitions.
• Evolve Unit Economics datasets to connect revenue and diverse cost drivers, enabling teams to understand product profitability and resource efficiency.
• Build reliable ingestion and transformation pipelines for non‑platform systems such as Jira and other BizTech enterprise applications.
• Translate ambiguous requirements into clear source contracts, reusable fact and dimension models, and technical designs.
• Develop configurable pipelines and shared components that simplify onboarding new data sources, products, and business requirements.
• Establish automated testing, reconciliation, anomaly detection, and monitoring to protect data accuracy, completeness, and availability.
• Lead safe migrations and historical backfills through dependency analysis, validation, controlled cutovers, and recovery planning.
• Optimize distributed processing, storage, and query performance to improve freshness and reduce compute costs.
• Own production reliability through on‑call participation, incident response, and lasting improvements to systems and runbooks.
• Shape the technical roadmap, lead design reviews, mentor engineers, and contribute improvements to Airbnb’s Data Engineering Paved Path.

Your Expertise

• 9+ years of relevant industry experience with a Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience; or 6+ years of relevant experience with a PhD.
• A track record of leading complex data engineering initiatives from ambiguous requirements through architecture, delivery, and sustained production ownership.
• Deep expertise in SQL and strong programming skills in Python or Scala, with experience building maintainable, well‑tested data systems.
• Extensive experience with distributed processing technologies such as Apache Spark and large‑scale analytical storage systems.
• Strong data modeling skills, including fact and dimension design, slowly changing dimensions, incremental processing, and historical data management.
• Experience integrating heterogeneous sources, including APIs, enterprise applications, event data, and transactional systems, while managing schema changes and source reliability.
• Proven ability to build reliable pipelines and execute migrations and backfills while preserving correctness and downstream compatibility.
• Experience establishing data quality controls, observability, lineage, governance, and effective incident recovery practices.
• Strong performance engineering skills, including diagnosing bottlenecks and optimizing distributed computation, storage, and query execution.
• The ability to align stakeholders across engineering and business functions, communicate architectural tradeoffs, and drive decisions across team boundaries.
• Demonstrated technical leadership through mentorship, architectural guidance, and improvements to shared engineering practices.
• Curiosity and sound judgment when learning new domains and balancing immediate delivery needs with long‑term system health.
• Experience with AI usage or cost measurement, cloud cost attribution, Unit Economics, enterprise application data, or financial and payments datasets is a plus.
• Familiarity with workflow orchestration, SQL transformation frameworks, and modern table formats such as Apache Iceberg is also valuable.

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. While the position is Remote Eligible, you must live in a state where Airbnb, Inc. has a registered entity. This list is continuously evolving, so please check back with us if the state you live in is on the exclusion list. If your position is employed by another Airbnb entity, your recruiter will inform you what states you are eligible to work from.

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.

A Note on Recruiting Scams

Scammers sometimes pose as Airbnb recruiters to get money or personal information from candidates. A few things that will always be true for Airbnb’s hiring process: our open roles are posted on Airbnb’s Career’s Page at careers.airbnb.com, and our recruiters correspond only from @ airbnb.com or @ ext.airbnb.com email addresses. Our recruiters will never ask for your Social Security number, bank account details, passport, or payment app information while you are interviewing. We’ll also never ask you to pay a fee, send money, deposit or cash a check, or purchase work‑related equipment (such as a company laptop) during the interview process. We encourage candidates to remain vigilant of these recruiting scams and not share sensitive information if you do not believe an individual is actually affiliated with Airbnb.