Senior Staff Data Engineer, Foundational Data

Airbnb

1d•$248,000 - $310,000•Remote

About The Position

The Foundational Data team builds and operates high-quality, widely reused datasets that power critical decisions across Airbnb. This includes measuring site traffic, separating bot traffic from organic traffic, and attributing cloud costs to Airbnb services. The team is now expanding to measure AI, focusing on the cost, usage, and performance of internally trained models and AI tools used by engineers. This new area will be crucial for understanding the return on investment for AI initiatives at Airbnb. The Foundational Data team is part of Cloud Infrastructure and comprises a mix of Data Engineers and Analytics Engineers working collaboratively.

Requirements

12+ years of relevant industry experience with a BS/Masters, or 9+ years with a PhD, in data engineering or a closely related field.
Designed, built, and operated production data pipelines at large scale.
Proficient in SQL and Python.
Ability to design a dimensional model and define a metric others will trust.
Experience moving into an unfamiliar data or technical domain and becoming productive quickly, building enough understanding of the underlying systems to model them well.
Experience as a technical lead on a team or program, setting direction that other senior engineers executed against without formal authority, while still writing code.
Experience writing the multi-year technical strategy for an area, and getting other organizations to fund and deliver against it.
Experience building a data product where no schema or precedent existed, and persuading other teams to adopt it.
Experience writing the document that aligned several teams on a contested technical decision.
Ability to explain a data model to a finance partner as readily as to an engineer.

Nice To Haves

Scala experience is useful but not required.
No prior experience with cloud cost, infrastructure, or AI/ML data is required to succeed.

Responsibilities

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.