Senior Staff Data Engineer (Foundational Data)
Confirmed on the employer's own hiring board on Oct 13, 2026. First seen by Alion on Oct 1, 2026. Airbnb scores B on the Alion truth index.
Join Airbnb as a Senior Staff Data Engineer in the Foundational Data team. You will be the technical leader, setting the direction for the team and owning the long-term data architecture. This hands-on role requires expertise in data engineering and analytics engineering, as you will work across both disciplines. You will design and build datasets that integrate cost, utilization, performance, and reliability signals across Airbnb's infrastructure fleets. Additionally, you will influence and coach a distributed team of Data Engineers and Analytics Engineers, navigate conflicting stakeholder requirements, and participate in the team's on-call rotation.
Missions
- 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.
- Design and build the datasets that integrate cost, utilization, performance, and reliability signals across Airbnb's infrastructure fleets, starting from a blank page.
Profil recherché
- You do not need prior experience with cloud cost, infrastructure, or AI/ML data to succeed here- 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 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
- 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 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
- 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 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 can design a dimensional model and define a metric others will trust, even if analytics engineering has not been your job title