Senior Staff Data Engineer, Foundational Data

At Airbnb, our mission is to create a world where anyone can belong anywhere. The Foundational Data team builds and operates the high-quality, widely reused datasets that power critical decisions across Airbnb: how visitors are measured from site traffic, how bot traffic is separated from organic traffic, and how cloud costs are attributed to Airbnb services. Our cost dashboards are among the most-used at Airbnb, relied on by technical leads, finance, and executives. Every dollar Airbnb spends running its infrastructure is attributed by models this team owns.

We are now building a third pillar, and it puts this team at the forefront of how Airbnb measures AI: the cost, usage, and performance of the models we train and serve ourselves, and of the AI tools our own engineers use every day. When Airbnb asks whether an AI investment is paying off, the answer comes from datasets this team builds.

Foundational Data sits inside Cloud Infrastructure and is a deliberate mix of Data Engineers and Analytics Engineers working as one team.

As a Senior Staff Data Engineer, you are the technical leader for this team and the person who sets its direction. This is a hands-on role with no direct reports: you will own the long-term data architecture and you will build against it, from the Airflow-orchestrated pipelines that ingest telemetry, logs, and billing data through to the dimensional models and Minerva definitions that thousands of people at Airbnb reason with. Because we are a mixed DE and AE team, you will work across both disciplines: this role needs data engineering depth, plus enough fluency in metric and dimensional modeling to set direction for the analytics engineering side.

Infrastructure intelligence is where you will start, and it is fresh ground. The signals describing our fleets are fragmented across cost, utilization telemetry, service performance, and GPU and model telemetry. Nobody has modeled this coherently yet, and the AI side is the least charted part of all. There is no schema to inherit. You would decide what these datasets are, then bring the rest of the company along.

This work carries regular visibility to directors and VPs across Infrastructure and Finance.

• Provide technical leadership across the team's data engineering and analytics engineering work, spanning cloud cost, traffic & bots, and infrastructure intelligence
• Define and own the multi-year data strategy and architecture for Airbnb's foundational data assets, and build the cross-org consensus needed to fund and execute it
• Own how Airbnb measures its AI: the unit economics of training and serving our own models, GPU fleet utilization, and the cost and adoption of developer AI tooling
• Design and build the datasets that integrate cost, utilization, performance, and reliability signals across Airbnb's infrastructure fleets, starting from a blank page
• Stay hands-on in the pipelines and models you architect, close enough to the build to catch the problems design reviews miss
• Influence and coach a distributed team of Data Engineers and Analytics Engineers, raising the quality bar through design and code review and scaling it by building the frameworks and automated checks other teams adopt
• Navigate conflicting stakeholder requirements across Infrastructure, Finance, Data Science, and Product Engineering, and land a single definition everyone can build on
• Identify and eliminate duplication and data fragmentation across the engineering organization, driving deprecation of what your models replace
• Participate in the team's on-call rotation for the datasets we own

You do not need prior experience with cloud cost, infrastructure, or AI/ML data to succeed here. What we cannot teach is the following.

• 12+ years of relevant industry experience with a BS/Masters, or 9+ years with a PhD, in data engineering or a closely related field
• You have designed, built, and operated production data pipelines at large scale, and you write strong SQL and Python. Scala experience is useful but not required
• You can design a dimensional model and define a metric others will trust, even if analytics engineering has not been your job title
• You have moved into an unfamiliar data or technical domain and become productive quickly, building enough understanding of the underlying systems to model them well
• You have been the technical lead on a team or program, setting direction that other senior engineers executed against without formal authority over them, while still writing code yourself
• You have written the multi-year technical strategy for an area, and got other organizations to fund and deliver against it
• You have built a data product where no schema or precedent existed, and persuaded other teams to adopt it
• You have written the document that aligned several teams on a contested technical decision, and you can explain a data model to a finance partner as readily as to an engineer

Your Location:

position is completely Remote- USA

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. Click here for the up-to-date list of excluded states. 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.
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 Payments, Inc. (a subsidiary of Airbnb, Inc.) is a registered entity. Approved remote states include: Alabama, California, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Minnesota, Mississippi, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, and Washington. This list is continuously evolving, so please check back with us if the state you live in is excluded. If your position is employed by another Airbnb entity, your recruiter will inform you what states you are eligible to work from.

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: [email protected]. 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.

Equal Employment Opportunity:

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.