Senior Staff Data Engineer - Data Stewardship

The Community You Will Join

The Data Stewardship team is a group of passionate data practitioners with a diverse background in analytics, data modeling, governance, compliance, and scaled data quality. We are responsible for ensuring Airbnb is meeting its compliance obligations across our data ecosystem and ensuring data consumers are able to easily identify the best data for their needs. We support the pipelines, programs, and policy-bodies that make this possible. You’ll be part of the overall Data Infrastructure organization that is responsible for online and offline data infrastructure across the company, and the components that transition data between these environments.

The Difference You Will Make

• Set the North Star: you will define the multi-year vision for Data Governance and Data Quality that scales with our global business and evolving AI landscape.
• Organizational Influence: Act as a primary consultant for executive leadership on data governance, ensuring that compliance and stewardship are integrated into the data product lifecycle from day one.

A Typical Day

• Architect Ecosystems: Lead the design of overarching data architectures that don't just solve today’s batch needs but anticipate future real-time and AI-driven requirements.
• Scale Best Practices: Rather than just "ensuring quality," you will define the best practices, tooling, and culture that enable data organizations to maintain high-quality data autonomously.
• Policy Stewardship: Lead cross-functional task forces (Infosec, Legal, Privacy) to navigate complex regulatory landscapes (like GDPR or AI Act) and translate them into engineering requirements.
• Mentor and Multiply: Coach Senior and Staff engineers across the organization on data best practices, fostering a community of excellence.

Your Expertise

• Leadership Track: 12+ years of industry experience, with a proven track record of leading large-scale data initiatives across multiple departments or business units.
• System Design at Scale: Demonstrated expertise in designing and evolving complex data ecosystems within complex, high-volume environments.
• Strategic Collaboration: Experience influencing product and business strategy by leveraging data integrity as a competitive advantage.
• Tech Stack Mastery: Deep expertise in the Java/Scala/Spark ecosystem (preferably with knowledge of S3 and Iceberg) with the ability to vet and introduce proven industry approaches and new technologies to the stack. Strong knowledge of relational databases and query authoring (SQL).
• Change Management: Strong ability to drive cultural shifts regarding data ownership and quality across an entire engineering organization.

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.