Engineering Manager, Streaming Infrastructure

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.

Airbnb’s Data Infrastructure organization builds the platforms that power data across the company. Within it, the Data Movement & Transformation (DMT) organization owns the platform that moves data between Airbnb’s online databases, event streams, and data warehouse, and transforms it along the way. Fraud prevention, real-time reporting, search, and AI products all depend on it.

Much of that data still moves through bespoke pipelines that each team builds and runs differently. We’re replacing them with one declarative, self-serve platform. You define your data once, and the platform provisions, runs, and evolves the pipelines that deliver it wherever it needs to go. Hundreds of production pipelines already run on it. Next, we’re bringing every data movement use case at Airbnb onto one platform, with a simpler architecture underneath and a single entry point for every engineer. This work is foundational to Data as a Service, a top-level initiative sponsored by senior infrastructure leadership.

DMT is made up of four teams: Data Frameworks, Ingestion, Realtime Data Infrastructure, and Schema Management. We’re hiring an Engineering Manager to lead Schema Management.

The Team You Will Lead:

Schema Management owns how schemas are defined, registered, and safely evolved across streaming, storage, and warehouse systems. The team’s work includes:

• The AirSchema language, compiler, and descriptors, the schema definition layer for UDS-ORM, UDS-SQL, and AirBus

• The schema deployment pipeline and metadata service

• The Schema Registry service that backs AirBus pipelines

Every product and pipeline at Airbnb depends on these contracts. The team is critical to the declarative platform, since “define your data once” only works if schemas are trustworthy and propagate everywhere safely.

The Difference You Will Make:

• Make schemas a contract across every system. Build schema management where a change is validated and propagated end to end across streaming, storage, and warehouse systems, with no human in the loop.

• Enable “define once, deliver everywhere.” Make AirSchema the single source of truth that the declarative data movement platform builds on, and drive adoption across Airbnb’s engineering teams.

• Guarantee safe evolution. Set the bar for compatibility, validation, and rollout so schema changes don’t break pipelines, products, or downstream consumers.

• Support compliance and trust. Provide the schema-level foundation, including annotations, lineage, and access controls, that the business relies on for fraud prevention, reporting, and compliance.

• Build the data foundation for AI. Airbnb’s AI and agent platforms are building on DMT. Well-defined, well-documented schemas are what make that data trustworthy and usable.

• Make it self-serve. Give every engineer a simple, single path to define and evolve their data, with AI-assisted tools for debugging and operations.

• Grow the team. Attract and hire top talent, mentor engineers, and manage their careers and promotions. Build a culture of rigor and responsible speed, from design through code review to production.

A Typical Day:

• Review designs and roadmap tradeoffs with your tech lead and stay close to key technical decisions.

• Hold 1:1s and coach engineers on growth, performance, and promotion.

• Triage issues and requests from teams adopting AirSchema and the Schema Registry.

• Align with Data Frameworks, Ingestion, Realtime Data Infrastructure, UDS, and other partner teams on shared charters and dependencies.

• Interview candidates and plan headcount.

Your Expertise:

• 3+ years