Engineering Manager, Data Movement & Transformation

The Community You Will Join:

The Data Movement and Transformation team is part of Airbnb’s Data Infrastructure group, which builds and operates the foundational platforms that power data across Airbnb.
Our team focuses on providing a declarative, scalable, and reliable platform for defining and operating data movement and transformation pipelines across multiple storage systems. This platform enables teams across Airbnb to safely move, transform, and materialize data that powers critical product experiences and operational workflows.
At the center of this effort is Airbus, Airbnb’s internal platform for managing large-scale data movement pipelines across databases and data infrastructure. Airbus enables teams to declaratively define pipelines while the platform automatically handles provisioning, orchestration, reliability, and schema evolution.
With systems operating globally and supporting a wide range of use cases, scalability, reliability, efficiency, usability, and long-term platform sustainability are core to our mission.

 

The Difference You Will Make:

As an Engineering Manager for the Airbus Control Plane team, you will lead a talented and diverse group of engineers responsible for building and operating the systems that power Airbnb’s data movement infrastructure.

Your team develops the control plane responsible for defining, orchestrating, and operating data pipelines reliably at scale. This includes systems for pipeline configuration, automated deployments, cluster provisioning, SLA tracking, auto-remediation, and schema change propagation.

You will also play a key role in ensuring that the open-source technologies used by Airbus are deeply integrated with Airbnb’s internal Compute, Networking, and Security platforms, enabling teams across the company to move and manage data safely and efficiently.

This role sits at the intersection of distributed systems, developer platforms, and data infrastructure, and has broad impact across many of Airbnb’s core product and infrastructure teams. 

Examples of systems owned by the team include:

• Pipeline definition interfaces that enable teams to declaratively define data pipelines and transformations powering many critical Airbnb use cases.
• Orchestration services responsible for managing the lifecycle of pipelines and the infrastructure they depend on.
• Materialization services that consume change logs and integrate with Airbnb’s GraphQL layer to join, transform, and transport data across multiple storage systems.
• Infrastructure provisioning and integration, including automated creation and management of Kafka topics, Flink jobs, and connectors to systems such as Iceberg, DynamoDB, Elasticsearch, and caching layers.
• Schema management systems that detect, validate, and automatically remediate unexpected schema changes across databases to maintain pipeline reliability.
  
  

You will work closely with peers across Online Data, product engineering teams, and infrastructure groups including Compute, Networking, Security, and Reliability, as well as with external partners and open source communities.

A Typical Day:

• Partner with the Tech Lead and team to define and execute the long-term vision and multi-year roadmap for the Airbus Control Plane.
• Guide architectural direction and stay engaged with key technical designs, serving as a thought partner and sounding board for engineers and tech leads.
• Synthesize complex technical topics and represent the team’s work, priorities, and tradeoffs to senior leadership and partner teams.
• Collaborate with Data Movement, Online Data, and Offline Data teams to ensure Airbus integrates seamlessly across Airbnb’s broader data ecosystem.
• Hire and develop exceptional engineers, providing mentorship, feedback, and career growth opportunities.
• Foster a culture of engineering excellence and operational rigor, balancing thoughtful design with the ability to move fast responsibly.
• Represent Airbnb in open source communities and external partnerships to help shape the ecosystem around the technologies the team builds upon.

Your Expertise:

• 3+ years of engineering management experience, with 8+ years of relevant software development experience in a fast-paced technology environment.
• Experience building and operating distributed systems, databases, or large-scale infrastructure services.
• Experience designing and evolving systems intended to operate reliably over long time horizons.
• Experience scaling teams and contributing to organizational design in growing engineering organizations.
• Strong familiarity with at least one major public cloud platform (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and core infrastructure primitives such as compute, storage, networking, Kubernetes, and security systems.
• Excellent communication skills and the ability to collaborate effectively across engineering and product organizations.

 

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.