Engineering Manager, Marketing Technology

Airbnb was born in 2007 when two hosts welcomed three guests to their San Francisco home, and has since grown to over 5 million hosts who have welcomed over 2 billion guest arrivals in almost every country across the globe. Every day, hosts offer unique stays and experiences that make it possible for guests to connect with communities in a more authentic way. THE COMMUNITY YOU WILL JOIN Airbnb's Marketing Technology organization builds the infrastructure that powers how we reach and connect with guests and hosts around the world — from audience segmentation and campaign orchestration to last-mile delivery and real-time insights. Our engineers work at the intersection of scale, reliability, and product impact, building platforms that carry billions of messages each year across email, SMS, push, and WhatsApp. We are deeply committed to building AI-natively: agents and LLM-powered automation are becoming core to how we build, operate, and improve our systems. You'll lead two closely partnered teams that together own Airbnb's communications platform end to end. The Orchestration team builds the systems that let marketing and product teams design and run personalized, event- and list-triggered customer journeys at Airbnb scale. The Delivery team owns the last mile — routing every notification through the right provider, tracking it to a terminal state, and managing contact preferences and vendor relationships. Both teams collaborate deeply with audience segmentation, content, ML, and data engineering teams, as well as product partners across the company. THE DIFFERENCE YOU WILL MAKE As the Engineering Manager for this team, you will be the primary technical leader for the systems that decide whether a message reaches a guest or host — and when. You'll set the technical direction, own roadmap execution, and build the kind of team culture where engineers grow and do the best work of their careers, including through deep, genuine adoption of AI-native engineering practices. The platform is mid-transformation. We are consolidating legacy and next-generation messaging flows onto a single unified path, moving platform health from component metrics to business-impact signals such as campaign delivery SLAs and burn rate, and building end-to-end observability so any owner — human or agent — can answer "what happened to notification X for user Y" in minutes. At the same time, both teams are standing up agentic capabilities: an agent-driven orchestration layer, end-to-end lifecycle testing agents, smart notification scheduling, and AI-assisted on-call triage. You will be the leader who ensures these systems ship with the rigor, reliability, and operational maturity that production-grade messaging and agentic systems demand. Your leadership will directly determine how reliably Airbnb communicates with its community, how confidently partner teams can build on the platform, and how effectively this team leads Marketing Technology's shift toward AI-native engineering. A TYPICAL DAY • Lead planning, roadmap reviews, and cross-team syncs for Delivery and Orchestration, keeping delivery on track and stakeholders well-informed • Run 1:1s with engineers across both teams, with intentional focus on career growth, technical skill development, and early identification of blockers • Serve as the primary engineering point of contact for cross-team dependencies — fielding requests from product teams across Airbnb and making clear, reasoned prioritization calls • Partner with the Product Manager to sequence the roadmap across journey orchestration, bulk campaign sends, and delivery infrastructure • Drive technical strategy for end-to-end observability and SLA-driven delivery: campaign-level delivery tracking, health-gated ramping, dynamic pacing against budgets, and automatic provider failover • Oversee the design, delivery, and operational health of production agentic systems: agent-driven orchestration, lifecycle testing agents, smart scheduling, and LLM-assisted on-call triage • Champion AI-native development practices across both teams — from AI-assisted coding and review to agents in CI/CD, on-call response, and delivery anomaly detection • Own the health and operational maturity of both teams: daytime and 24/7 on-call programs, blameless incident retrospectives, SLO definitions, runbook quality, and third-party messaging vendor escalations • Represent the communications platform in org-wide planning cycles and contribute to the broader Marketing Technology engineering strategy YOUR EXPERTISE Required • 5+ years of software engineering experience, with 4+ years in an engineering management role leading platform or infrastructure teams • Demonstrated AI-native engineering mindset — you use AI tools daily in your own work, have led teams in genuinely adopting AI-assisted development, and have strong opinions about where agents add real leverage vs. hype • Experience leading teams that have designed, built, and operated production-grade agentic systems — autonomous or semi-autonomous agent pipelines, LLM-orchestrated workflows, or multi-agent architectures handling real production traffic • Strong technical foundation in high-throughput distributed systems: event-driven architectures, message queues and streaming (Kafka or similar), workflow orchestration engines (Temporal or similar), and multi-provider integrations — able to engage credibly in architecture and design conversations • Track record of running reliable, customer-facing production services with defined SLOs, including on-call programs, incident management, and operational excellence across teams of varying size and seniority • Demonstrated experience managing engineers across a range of seniority levels, including early-career engineers, with a track record of meaningful career growth outcomes • Experience owning cross-team platform relationships: managing inbound dependency requests, negotiating priorities, and communicating commitments with confidence • Track record of delivering complex, multi-quarter technical roadmaps — including large-scale migrations or legacy system consolidations — in fast-moving environments Preferred • Experience with notification, messaging, or communications infrastructure at scale — email, SMS, push, or WhatsApp delivery. • Experience with customer journey orchestration, marketing automation, or lifecycle messaging platforms • Hands-on familiarity with agent frameworks and orchestration tooling (e.g., LangGraph, CrewAI, Autogen, Temporal, or similar) and practical knowledge of where these systems break down in production • Experience building end-to-end observability and business-impact alerting for multi-hop asynchronous pipelines • Experience managing teams that own 24/7 on-call rotations and production services with external SLAs or vendor dependencies YOUR LOCATION This role is eligible for remote work within the United States. Employees may optionally use any of our US office locations. We expect team members to be available during core collaboration hours in their time zone and to participate in occasional onsite gatherings as the team and org schedule them, typically 2–4 times per year. 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. How We'll Take Care of You: Our job titles may span more than one career level. The actual base pay is dependent upon many factors, such as: training, transferable skills, work experience, business needs and market demands. The base pay range is subject to change and may be modified in the future. This role may also be eligible for bonus, equity, benefits, and Employee Travel Credits. Pay Range $212,000—$265,000 USD How We'll Take Care of You: Our job titles may span more than one career level. This role may also be eligible for sales incentives, equity, benefits, and Employee Travel Credits. Pay Range $212,000—$265,000 USD How We'll Take Care of You: Our job titles may span more than one career level. The actual hourly rate is dependent upon many factors, such as: education, experience, and skills. The hourly rate is subject to change and may be modified in the future. This role may also be eligible for bonus, equity, benefits, and Employee Travel Credits. Pay Range $212,000—$265,000 USD How we’ll take care of you: Our job titles may span more than one career or degree level. This role may also be eligible for benefits and Employee Travel Credits. Pay Range $212,000—$265,000 USD Reasonable Accommodations: We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations throughout the recruitment process for applicants with disabilities. If you need assistance, or an accommodation, please let your recruiter know once you are contacted about a role. A Note on Recruiting Scams: Scammers sometimes pose as Airbnb recruiters to get money or personal information from candidates. A few things that will always be true for Airbnb’s hiring process: our open roles are posted on Airbnb’s Career’s Page at careers.airbnb.com, and our recruiters correspond only from @airbnb.com or @ext.airbnb.com email addresses. Our recruiters will never ask for your Social Security number, bank account details, passport, or payment app information while you are interviewing. We’ll also never ask you to pay a fee, send money, deposit or cash a check, or purchase work-related equipment (such as a company laptop) during the interview process. We encourage candidates to remain vigilant of these recruiting scams and not share sensitive information if you do not believe an individual is actually affiliated with Airbnb.