Engineering Manager, Streaming Infrastructure

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 of engineering management experience and 6+ years of hands-on software engineering in a fast-paced environment.
• Experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems, ideally data platforms, storage, or streaming infrastructure.
• Familiarity with schema and data contract systems, such as schema registries, Avro or Protobuf, and compatibility and evolution strategies. Experience with language or compiler tooling, metadata services, or declarative configuration is a plus.
• Familiarity with at least one adjacent area, and the curiosity to learn the others: Kafka or similar distributed logs, stream or batch processing (Flink, Spark), CDC and database replication, or control planes and Kubernetes operators.
• A track record of leading large migrations or platform consolidations, including getting other teams to adopt the new path and safely retiring the old one.
• Strong production ownership: on-call, incident response, root cause analysis, and designing for availability.
• Experience scaling a team through hiring, onboarding, career development, and org design.
• Strong judgment on tradeoffs between short-term delivery and long-term maintainability.
• Excellent communication. You can influence across teams and explain tradeoffs to both infrastructure engineers and product or data teams.
• Strong collaboration skills in a remote working environment.

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: reasonableaccommodations@airbnb.com. 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.

Equal Employment Opportunity:

Airbnb values diversity & belonging and is proud to be an Equal Employment Opportunity employer. All individuals seeking employment at Airbnb are considered without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, age, gender, sex, marital status, ancestry, physical or mental disability, veteran status, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, or any other legally protected characteristic.