Staff Data Engineer, Guest Data

The Community You Will Join:

The Guest Data team owns some of the most foundational datasets at the company surrounding the core booking experience on Airbnb. This includes core metric datasets like Reservations and highly granular datasets like User Engagement on the Product.

The Difference You Will Make:

As a Staff Data Engineer, you will shape our data strategy and provide hands-on technical leadership to a team of talented engineers. You will closely partner with cross-functional teams across Product, Analytics Engineering, Data Science, and ML/AI to unlock value for our Guests and Hosts through insights and data driven products.

A Typical Day: 

• Develop and automate large scale, high-performance data processing systems (batch and/or streaming) to drive Airbnb business growth and improve the product experience
• Design our data models for optimal storage and retrieval and to meet critical product and business requirements
• Collaborate and build relationships with partner teams across functions including product, data science, and AI/ML
• Understand and influence logging to support our data flow, architecting logging best practices where needed
• Improve data quality by using & improving internal tools to automatically detect issues

Your Expertise:

• 9+ years of experience with a BS/Masters, preferably in CS, or 6+ years with a PhD
• Proficiency in at least one programming language commonly used within Data Engineering, such as Python, Java, or Scala
• Experience with distributed processing technologies and frameworks, such as Hadoop, Spark, Kafka, and distributed storage systems (e.g., HDFS, S3)
• Expertise with ETL schedulers such as Apache Airflow, Luigi, Oozie, AWS Glue or similar frameworks
• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to effectively collaborate with cross-functional teams and explain technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders
• Solid understanding of data warehousing concepts and hands-on experience with relational databases (e.g., PostgreSQL, MySQL) and columnar databases (e.g., Redshift, BigQuery, HBase, ClickHouse)
• Strong problem-solving skills and the ability to troubleshoot complex data issues

Nice to have:

• Familiarity with SQL and NoSQL databases, data modeling, and query optimization
• Deep understanding of software engineering principles, including object-oriented and functional programming paradigms, design patterns, and code quality practices
• Experience with version control systems (e.g., Git, SVN, Mercurial) and expertise with CI/CD practices

Your Location:

This position is US - Remote Eligible. The role may include occasional work at an Airbnb office or attendance at offsites, as agreed to with your manager. While the position is Remote Eligible, you must live in a state where Airbnb, Inc. has a registered entity. Click here for the up-to-date list of excluded states. This list is continuously evolving, so please check back with us if the state you live in is on the exclusion list. If your position is employed by another Airbnb entity, your recruiter will inform you what states you are eligible to work from.

Our Commitment To Inclusion & Belonging:

Airbnb is committed to working with the broadest talent pool possible. We believe diverse ideas foster innovation and engagement, and allow us to attract creatively-led people, and to develop the best products, services and solutions. All qualified individuals are encouraged to apply.

We strive to also provide a disability inclusive application and interview process. If you are a candidate with a disability and require reasonable accommodation in order to submit an application, please contact us at: [email protected]. Please include your full name, the role you’re applying for and the accommodation necessary to assist you with the recruiting process. 

We ask that you only reach out to us if you are a candidate whose disability prevents you from being able to complete our online application.