Staff Data Engineer, CS Data Platform

The Community You Will Join:

The Airbnb Community Support (CS)’s vision is to build the world's most loyal travel community through exceptional service. It is an area of unprecedented scale and complexity. In no other domain the efficiency and reliability of servicing tech translates so directly into competitive advantage, brand loyalty and the fundamentals of the business. Airbnb has excelled in this area for years thanks to a purposeful way we applied innovation backed by data and how constant experimentation allowed us to discover new paths to follow.

Currently we are in the process of extending our platform with Generative AI, intelligent resolutions and process automation at a scale the Travel industry has not seen before. Data infrastructure along with real-time AI capabilities are the core components of the new ecosystem.

Our agents will be equipped with real time access to contextually relevant information, scoring engines will assist in recommending the best course of action, while automation workflows will take the tedious, repeatable tasks off agent’s shoulders and give the customers freedom to solve most of the issues without waiting in line. 

Establishing sustainable technology and governance processes that can deliver large volumes of quality data from across all diverse Airbnb sources is the key to successful execution of the ambitious strategy we have laid out.

The Difference You Will Make:

Within CS, the CS Data Platform team is responsible for providing consistent and trustworthy data foundations and metrics for the most important data across offline and online consumption, including experimentation, ML, measurement, product and operational insights. Our customers are ML and backend engineers, analytics and operations teams.

We're Looking For a Staff Data Engineer with data experience to take the lead in evolving our CS Data Platform. This role is pivotal in building and innovating the backbone that supports CSxAI (Customer Support x Artificial Intelligence) initiatives to enable intelligent, scalable and exceptional service experience by building reusable platform capabilities, such as data processing pipelines and integration frameworks to empower intelligent community support products.

The related services include, but are not limited to, LLM-related data logging, indexing and serving solutions, Real-time metric platform, 3rd-party data exchange framework, CS business context data framework, Customer journey data serving.

A Typical Day: 

• Design, build, and maintain robust and efficient data pipelines and APIs that collect, process, and serve data from various sources, including backend events logged as part of LLM flows, customer interactions across multiple channels, CS agents, LLM evaluations etc.

• Work closely with Machine Learning team, Data Science and cross-functional engineering teams in the Community Support Platform, understanding their productivity and feature pain points, and build solutions to resolve them scalably and flexibly.

• Develop, automate and standardize: logging, enriching, serving data for ML training, inference, benchmarking and monitoring (anomaly detection, safe deploys) to build the next generation of Generative AI products

• Advance the state of our 3rd party data integrations by building and extending framework for data exchange, governance and lineage of data

• Lead Technological Advancement: Drive the evolution of CS data architecture towards modern technologies and collaborate with infrastructure engineering teams to evolve how we integrate data between batch and serving layers worlds, ML and non-ML, and allow systems to deal with data more effectively

• Participate in all phases of software development including architecture design, implementation and testing.

• Work collaboratively with cross-functional partners including product managers, operations and data scientists, identify opportunities for business impact, understand and prioritize requirements for data pipelines, drive engineering decisions and quantify impact.

• Support teammates in enabling code quality, operational excellence, and shared learning.

Your Expertise:

• 9+ years industry data engineering or backend engineering with data background

• Proven background in developing distributed batch/streaming data pipelines (e.g. Spark, Kafka/Flink) using distributed storage systems (e.g., HDFS, S3)

• Good knowledge of query authoring (SQL) and data processing (batch and streaming), 

• Demonstrated ability to analyze large data sets to identify gaps and inconsistencies, provide data insights, and advance effective product solutions

• Expertise with ETL schedulers such as Apache Airflow, Luigi, Oozie, AWS Glue or similar frameworks

• Solid understanding of data warehousing concepts and hands-on experience with relational databases (e.g., PostgreSQL, MySQL) and columnar databases (e.g., Redshift, BigQuery, HBase, ClickHouse)

• Experience working on/with end-to-end Machine Learning products is a significant plus.

• Experience developing and maintaining large-scale backend distributed systems using Java or Kotlin is a significant plus.

• Excellent collaboration and communication abilities, with the ability to work effectively with cross-functional teams.

• Strong architectural knowledge, comfort working across multiple repositories, services, and environments.

• Comfortable navigating ambiguity and ownership of problem definitions

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.