Senior Staff Data Engineer, Foundational Data

Remote · USD 248,000-310,000 · 9+ years experience · Remote · Posted Sep 22, 2026

At a glance

The Senior Staff Data Engineer will serve as the technical leader for the Foundational Data team, setting the long-term data architecture and strategy for Airbnb's critical data assets.
This hands-on role involves building pipelines and dimensional models to measure infrastructure intelligence, including cloud costs, AI model performance, and developer tooling usage.
The position requires working across both data engineering and analytics engineering disciplines to drive consensus and technical direction across the organization.

Provide technical leadership across data engineering and analytics engineering work spanning cloud cost, traffic, and infrastructure intelligence.
Define and own the multi-year data strategy and architecture for foundational data assets.
Build cross-org consensus to fund and execute the data strategy.
Own the measurement of AI unit economics, GPU fleet utilization, and developer AI tooling adoption.
Design and build datasets integrating cost, utilization, performance, and reliability signals.
Remain hands-on in pipelines and models to ensure architectural integrity.
Influence and coach a distributed team of Data and Analytics Engineers through design and code reviews.
Navigate conflicting stakeholder requirements across Infrastructure, Finance, Data Science, and Product Engineering.
Identify and eliminate duplication and data fragmentation across the engineering organization.
Participate in the team's on-call rotation for owned datasets.

12+ years of relevant industry experience with a BS/Masters, or 9+ years with a PhD, in data engineering or a closely related field.
Experience designing, building, and operating production data pipelines at large scale.
Strong proficiency in SQL and Python.
Ability to design dimensional models and define metrics.
Experience moving into an unfamiliar data or technical domain and becoming productive quickly.
Experience serving as a technical lead on a team or program, setting direction for others without formal authority.
Experience writing multi-year technical strategies and securing funding/delivery from other organizations.
Experience building a data product where no schema or precedent existed.
Experience aligning several teams on contested technical decisions and explaining data models to non-technical partners.

Position is completely Remote- USA.
Approved remote states include: Alabama, California, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Minnesota, Mississippi, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, and Washington.
Role may include occasional work at an Airbnb office or attendance at offsites.