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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: Marketplaces Data and AI is Airbnb's data and AI execution org, responsible for the machine learning, data engineering, and analytics systems that power how guests find the right place to stay and how hosts succeed on the platform. We build foundational data products used across Airbnb — by Trust, Customer Support, Search, and every team that needs a reliable, structured view of what is happening on our platform. The Core Entities program is the cornerstone of that foundation. It is the company's canonical semantic model for the objects that matter most to Airbnb — hosts, listings, users, and trips — and the events that happen across their lifecycles. This work feeds the intelligence layer that Airbnb's next generation of AI products depends on, and it is one of the top priorities for the company's engineering leadership. The Difference You Will Make: You will own two closely connected areas: Entity Data Foundation and Trip Intelligence.
Job Responsibility
Drive entity onboarding with producer teams across the company — unblock teams stuck on data quality issues, resolve schema ambiguity, and close the gap between what the platform promises and what data owners actually experience
Lead technical design on the trip entity — data model, lifecycle event taxonomy, real-time streaming architecture, and privacy-safe handling of message and conversation data
Closely partner with compute and data infrastructure teams to drive the state-of-the-art for realtime data processing at Airbnb
Partner with proactive trip support, customer support triage, and host AI product teams to validate that the signal layer meets their actual use cases, not a spec written in isolation
Work closely with the principal engineer and program manager on roadmap sequencing and escalation of infrastructure dependencies
Manage and develop a team of ~7 engineers — own their careers, not just their sprint output
Represent entity platform work in executive-level program reviews
this program is a direct priority for Airbnb's engineering leadership
Requirements
9+ years of industry experience, including 3-5+ years in engineering management
Bachelor's, Master's, or PhD in Computer Science, Data Engineering, or a related field
Background in data engineering, platform engineering, or data infrastructure — you understand entity modeling, schema evolution, data contracts, and what it takes to build systems that downstream teams can rely on
Hands-on fluency with distributed data systems: batch and streaming pipelines, online and offline serving, or event-driven architectures — sufficient to drive design reviews and challenge engineers on tradeoffs
Experience building in a cross-functional platform role — you have navigated the tension between what producers can deliver and what consumers need, and you know how to make progress without direct authority over every team in the chain
Comfort with greenfield work: you have built something from a blank schema or an early-stage spec, not just inherited a running system
Strong instinct for what belongs in shared infrastructure versus what stays in a product team
Clear communicator: able to represent technical decisions to senior leadership and keep producers and consumers aligned across a program with many moving parts
Commitment to engineering excellence, diversity, and belonging