Airbnb
Senior Staff Data Engineer, Foundational Data
$248K–$310K
United States · Senior Staff · Full-time · Posted Sep 22, 2026
- Experience
- 12+ years of relevant industry experience with a BS/Masters, or 9+ years with a PhD, in data engineering or a closely related field.
- Education
- BS/Masters, or PhD.
About the job
Leads and builds foundational data architecture, pipelines, and models, including datasets for infrastructure intelligence and measuring AI costs, usage, and performance.
What you'll do
- Set the team’s long-term data strategy and architecture, and build cross-organizational alignment to execute it.
- Build and operate pipelines and models integrating infrastructure cost, utilization, performance, and reliability data; define how Airbnb measures AI.
- Provide hands-on technical leadership, coach engineers, review designs and code, and participate in on-call.
What they ask for
- Production data pipeline design, development, and operations at large scale; strong SQL and Python.
- Ability to design dimensional models and trusted metrics, and to become productive in unfamiliar technical domains.
- Technical leadership setting direction and influencing teams without formal authority while remaining hands-on.
- Experience creating multi-year technical strategy and novel data products, securing organizational adoption.
Nice to have
- Scala experience is useful but not required.
Pay
$248,000 — $310,000 USD (base salary)
Tools
Airflow, SQL, Python, Scala, Minerva
AI focus
Build datasets measuring the cost, usage, and performance of internally trained and served models and engineers’ AI tools, including training and serving unit economics, GPU fleet utilization, and developer AI-tooling cost and adoption.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative