Staff Backend Engineer - Ads Platform

Airbnb

1d•$212,000 - $265,000•Remote

About The Position

The Ads Platform team builds the AI-powered growth engine behind Airbnb's paid marketing across Google, Meta, and the broader advertising ecosystem. We build the platform and intelligent systems that power paid campaigns — from creative to optimization to audience — at scale across every channel, with a strong commitment to brand safety, quality, and human oversight. Our ambition is bold: to build increasingly autonomous, AI-driven marketing systems that grow Airbnb's business. We sit at the intersection of engineering, marketing, and AI. You'll partner closely with Marketing, Product, and Design, work alongside Airbnb's ML/AI and data platform teams, and integrate deeply with the core product to turn a rich understanding of the customer journey into differentiated, high-performing paid experiences.

Requirements

9+ years of experience in a hands-on software engineering role.
Bachelor’s and/or Master’s degree, preferably in CS, or equivalent experience
Technical leadership: hands on experience leading project teams, setting technical direction and strategy and mentoring engineers.
Passionate about efficiency, availability, technical quality and system quality.
Passion to level-up those around you through curiosity and fostering a collaborative and inclusive team environment.
Proven experience in defining product/technical strategy and driving alignment with cross-functional leaders and stakeholders.
Strong communication and collaboration skills with experience driving initiatives that span across teams, departments and leadership.

Nice To Haves

Hands-on experience with paid advertising platforms (Meta, Google, or similar) — you understand how the ecosystem works, not just the engineering surface.

Responsibilities

Lead the technical strategy and hands-on execution of Airbnb's next-generation, AI-powered Growth Engine for paid channels (Google, Meta, and beyond).
Architect systems that autonomously manage the full lifecycle of paid campaigns — creative generation and rotation, bidding and budget optimization, audience management, and feed intelligence — at scale.
Set technical direction for the agentic Growth Engine — making architecture decisions on the systems that generate creatives, optimize bids and budgets, and manage audiences across Google, Meta, and other paid channels.
Write and review code hands-on, establishing engineering standards for quality, availability, and system health across the platform.
Partner directly with Marketing, Product, and Design to translate growth objectives into platform capabilities, and to define the human-in-the-loop controls that keep autonomous campaigns safe and on-brand.
Advance the AI-assisted → agentic → autonomous roadmap, identifying where to introduce automation next and de-risking it through experimentation and staged rollout.
Mentor engineers and act as a force multiplier — leveling up the team through design reviews, technical guidance, and a collaborative, inclusive culture.
Collaborate with ML/AI and data platform teams on the models and signals that feed campaign optimization, and integrate deeply with the Airbnb product to understand the customer journey.