Engineering Manager - CS Data Services

The Community You Will Join: 

The Community Support Engineering (CSE) organization ensures our hosts and guests receive exceptional support throughout their entire Airbnb journey. We build world-class tools for agents, operations teams, and AI systems—keeping our global community supported 24/7, 365 days a year.

Within CSE, the CS Data Services team builds APIs, data services, and libraries that provide secure, permission-aware, and structured access to agent, customer, and case data. We power mission-critical use cases across product engineering, machine learning, data engineering, and operational tooling.

The Difference You Will Make:

We are seeking an experienced Engineering Manager to lead the CS Data Services team. In this role, you will:

• Ramp up on the team’s technology, product, and business goals, including hands-on work to develop a deep technical understanding.

• Lead, mentor, and grow a high-performing engineering team in a fast-paced environment.

• Foster a team culture that emphasizes product thinking, technical depth, and customer-centric problem solving.

• Drive adoption of data services by partnering closely with teams across CSE to understand their use cases and deliver intuitive, scalable solutions.

• Set clear priorities and strategic direction in collaboration with engineering, product, machine learning, and data teams.

• Improve team processes to strengthen collaboration, execution efficiency, and delivery quality.

• Lead complex, cross-functional projects that align with business goals and deliver measurable impact.

We’re looking for someone who thrives at the intersection of backend and platform engineering—combining strong technical judgment, creativity, and a passion for engaging with partners.

Example Projects You Will Lead: 

• Unity: AI Contextual Data Store: Unity today serves as the primary source of user, listing, and reservation context for AI Assistant, but operates on fragmented definitions, manual onboarding, and limited governance. The initiative aims to evolve Unity into a canonical, metadata-rich, and fully governed contextual data platform that reliably powers every LLM-driven experience at Airbnb.

• DMC Search: this project aims to introduce a dedicated indexing and retrieval engine that consolidates all case and expense signals into a consistent, searchable Elasticsearch model. The system will deliver low-latency, scalable search capabilities through new ingestion pipelines and serving APIs that power all case list, global search, and expense views, serving ~5K users.

A Typical Day: 

• Collaborate with Staff+ engineers, TPMs, and cross-functional partners to define strategy and drive execution.

• Review and provide feedback on system designs, API design, data-serving patterns, and architectural decisions.

• Support the team in maintaining operational excellence, reliability, and continuous system improvements.

• Lead discussions that tie technical work to product outcomes and business priorities.

• Mentor engineers through coaching, career development, and a culture of ownership and curiosity.

• Represent the team in planning forums, shaping org-wide platform strategy and long-term technical direction.

Your Expertise:

• 9+ years of software engineering experience, with 3–5+ years managing engineering teams in a fast-paced environment; BS/MS in CS or a related field.

• Deep understanding of distributed systems, application-layer APIs, and event-driven architectures.

• Strong proficiency with Java/Kotlin, distributed queues (Kafka, SQS), GraphQL, data processing frameworks (Spark/Flink), and datastores (Redis, ElasticSearch, Cassandra, MySQL, or similar KV/relational systems).

• Demonstrated ability to balance long-term platform strategy with near-term product needs using sound technical judgment.

• Proven track record building reliable, scalable, high-quality systems and fostering a culture of accountability and ownership.

• Excellent communicator who can influence across teams and develop, motivate, and lead high-performing engineering organizations.

• Experience delivering large, complex technical initiatives end-to-end.

• Strong commitment to operational excellence, quality, reliability, and availability.

• Passionate about creating exceptional experiences for both end-users and internal partners.

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.