Engineering Manager, Workflow Orchestration - Data Infrastructure

Airbnb

6d•Remote

About The Position

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 You will join the Workflow Orchestration team within Airbnb’s Data Infrastructure org. This team owns the orchestration layer that coordinates, executes, and monitors complex data workflows across batch and streaming domains. Our mission is to empower data engineers, ML teams, analytics, and operational applications with robust, scalable, and observable orchestration platforms and tooling—ensuring that critical business workflows run reliably, efficiently, and transparently. The Difference You Will Make As an Engineering Manager on the Workflow Orchestration team, you will: Lead and grow a high-performing team responsible for designing, implementing, and operating distributed orchestration infrastructure that runs tens of thousands of data workflows daily. Define the long-term technical vision and roadmap for orchestration, aligning to Airbnb’s broader Data Infrastructure and Analytics platform strategy. Drive adoption of best-in-class workflow paradigms and tooling across data engineering, reliability, and ML teams, ensuring consistency, performance, and operational excellence. Partner closely with cross-functional teams in Data Platform, Compute, Storage, Analytics, and ML Infrastructure to integrate orchestration capabilities into wider data ecosystems. Coach and mentor engineers, enabling strong technical judgment, clarity of thinking, and ownership across the team. A Typical Day Collaborate with senior engineering leaders to shape multi-year strategies for workflow orchestration and execution platforms. Stay connected to architectural decisions, review designs, and help unblock technical challenges. Partner with product and engineering leaders across Data Infrastructure to prioritize investments that balance reliability, developer experience, and cost. Ensure the team practices strong delivery discipline, operational monitoring, and on-call readiness for critical orchestration infrastructure. Staying up to date with emerging technologies, best practices, and industry trends in data engineering and software development. Recruit top engineering talent and grow the careers of engineers, with a focus on inclusive leadership and psychological safety.

Requirements

5+ years of engineering leadership experience managing and scaling distributed systems teams.
Strong technical background in distributed systems, workflow orchestration engines, scheduling systems, or data infrastructure tooling.
Previous working experience in large scale orchestration frameworks such as Apache Airflow, Dagster, Flyte, Prefect, Kubeflow, Maestro or similar platforms, and understanding of challenges around scaling, observability, and multi-tenancy.
Strong familiarity with software engineering principles, including object-oriented and functional programming paradigms, design patterns, and code quality practices.
A track record of partnering across engineering, product, and cross-functional teams to deliver reliable, high-quality infrastructure at scale.
Excellent written and verbal communication skills, especially in synthesizing complex technical concepts for broad audiences.

Responsibilities

Lead and grow a high-performing team responsible for designing, implementing, and operating distributed orchestration infrastructure that runs tens of thousands of data workflows daily.
Define the long-term technical vision and roadmap for orchestration, aligning to Airbnb’s broader Data Infrastructure and Analytics platform strategy.
Drive adoption of best-in-class workflow paradigms and tooling across data engineering, reliability, and ML teams, ensuring consistency, performance, and operational excellence.
Partner closely with cross-functional teams in Data Platform, Compute, Storage, Analytics, and ML Infrastructure to integrate orchestration capabilities into wider data ecosystems.
Coach and mentor engineers, enabling strong technical judgment, clarity of thinking, and ownership across the team.
Collaborate with senior engineering leaders to shape multi-year strategies for workflow orchestration and execution platforms.
Stay connected to architectural decisions, review designs, and help unblock technical challenges.
Partner with product and engineering leaders across Data Infrastructure to prioritize investments that balance reliability, developer experience, and cost.
Ensure the team practices strong delivery discipline, operational monitoring, and on-call readiness for critical orchestration infrastructure.
Staying up to date with emerging technologies, best practices, and industry trends in data engineering and software development.
Recruit top engineering talent and grow the careers of engineers, with a focus on inclusive leadership and psychological safety.