Engineering Manager, Marketing Technology

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

Airbnb's Marketing Technology organization builds the infrastructure that powers how we reach and connect with guests and hosts around the world — from audience segmentation and campaign orchestration to last-mile delivery and real-time insights. Our engineers work at the intersection of scale, reliability, and product impact, building platforms that carry billions of messages each year across email, SMS, push, and WhatsApp. We are deeply committed to building AI-natively: agents and LLM-powered automation are becoming core to how we build, operate, and improve our systems.

You'll lead two closely partnered teams that together own Airbnb's communications platform end to end. The Orchestration team builds the systems that let marketing and product teams design and run personalized, event- and list-triggered customer journeys at Airbnb scale. The Delivery team owns the last mile — routing every notification through the right provider, tracking it to a terminal state, and managing contact preferences and vendor relationships. Both teams collaborate deeply with audience segmentation, content, ML, and data engineering teams, as well as product partners across the company.

THE DIFFERENCE YOU WILL MAKE

As the Engineering Manager for this team, you will be the primary technical leader for the systems that decide whether a message reaches a guest or host — and when. You'll set the technical direction, own roadmap execution, and build the kind of team culture where engineers grow and do the best work of their careers, including through deep, genuine adoption of AI-native engineering practices.

The platform is mid-transformation. We are consolidating legacy and next-generation messaging flows onto a single unified path, moving platform health from component metrics to business-impact signals such as campaign delivery SLAs and burn rate, and building end-to-end observability so any owner — human or agent — can answer "what happened to notification X for user Y" in minutes. At the same time, both teams are standing up agentic capabilities: an agent-driven orchestration layer, end-to-end lifecycle testing agents, smart notification scheduling, and AI-assisted on-call triage. You will be the leader who ensures these systems ship with the rigor, reliability, and operational maturity that production-grade messaging and agentic systems demand.

Your leadership will directly determine how reliably Airbnb communicates with its community, how confidently partner teams can build on the platform, and how effectively this team leads Marketing Technology's shift toward AI-native engineering.

A TYPICAL DAY

• Lead planning, roadmap reviews, and cross-team syncs for Delivery and Orchestration, keeping delivery on track and stakeholders well-informed

• Run 1:1s with engineers across both teams, with intentional focus on career growth, technical skill development, and early identification of blockers

• Serve as the primary engineering point of contact for cross-team dependencies — fielding requests from product teams across Airbnb and making clear, reasoned prioritization calls

• Partner with the Product Manager to sequence the roadmap across journey orchestration, bulk campaign sends, and delivery infrastructure

• Drive technical strategy for end-to-end observability and SLA-driven delivery: campaign-level delivery tracking, health-gated ramping, dynamic pacing against budgets, and automatic provider failover

• Oversee the design, delivery, and operational health of production agentic systems: agent-driven orchestration, lifecycle testing agents, smart scheduling, and LLM-assisted on-call triage

• Champion AI-native development practices across both teams — from AI-assisted coding and review to agents in CI/CD, on-call response, and delivery anomaly detection

• Own the health and operational maturity of both teams: daytime and 24/7 on-call programs, blameless incident retrospectives, SLO definitions, runbook quality, and third-party messaging vendor escalations&l