Senior Manager Global Capacity and Operational Planning (Community Support)
About the role
The Community You Will Join
The Community Support org handles tens of millions of interactions yearly, engaging with Airbnb customers by phone, messaging, chat, or social media channels. The group handles hundreds of issues across categories including Cancellations, Account Issues, Refunds, Payments, Reservations, Extenuating Circumstances, Booking & Listing issues, Safety & Claims. The organization is globally distributed with offices in San Francisco, Dublin, Montreal, Seattle, Singapore, Manila, Gurgaon and an extensive partner network serving all regions.
The Difference You Will Make
We are looking for a Senior Manager for Demand Planning on our Community Support (CS) team. This leader is responsible for leading demand forecasting and long-term planning strategy across multi-channel contact center operations for our Global Operations team. This role ensures the organization has the right resources, at the right time, with the right skills to meet service level objectives while optimizing cost and productivity.
The role combines planning, advanced analytics, business partnership, and people leadership to drive scalable, data-driven workforce decisions in a complex, fast-changing environment.
A Typical Day
Demand Forecasting & Statistical Modeling
- Own short-term, mid-term, and long-term demand forecasting across all Global Operations teams and channels (phone, messaging, email, back-office etc.).
- Design, develop, and maintain statistically robust demand forecasting models using time series and machine learning techniques (e.g., exponential smoothing, ARIMA, regression-based models etc.).
- Perform trend, seasonality, and variance decomposition; detect structural breaks, outliers, and demand anomalies.
- Quantify forecast uncertainty through confidence intervals, error distributions, and bias analysis.
- Lead scenario modeling for peak demand periods, product launches, growth initiatives, and unplanned demand events.
- Continuously assess model performance using statistical accuracy metrics (MAPE, RMSE, MAE, bias etc).
- Establish model governance standards, including documentation, validation, back-testing, and post-mortem analysis.
- Research, prototype, and implement new forecasting and optimization techniques as business needs evolve.
- Perform scenario planning and sensitivity analysis to quantify trade-offs between service levels, cost, and utilization.
Advanced Analytics
- In partnership with the Analytics and Data Engineering team, design and build scalable planning data pipelines, dashboards, and automate forecasting and capacity models to improve scalability, repeatability, and timeliness.
- Use SQL and Python to extract, transform, and analyze large-scale operational datasets to monitor forecast accuracy, capacity gaps, utilization, and operational risk.
Decision Support & Stakeholder Communication
- Present forecast assumptions, methodologies, risks, trade-offs, and recommendations in clear, executive-ready formats and act as a trusted advisor to senior leadership and lead demand/capacity planning discussions in cross-functional forums.
- Align cross-functional stakeholders (Delivery, Product, Finance, HR, and others) to embed planning outputs into execution and operational decision-making.