Senior Staff Data Engineer (Data Stewardship)

Role Overview

Join Airbnb’s Data Stewardship team. As a Senior Staff Data Engineer (Data Stewardship), you will set the long-term vision for data governance and data quality, design overarching data architectures, and mentor engineers on best practices. You’ll partner with cross-functional teams to navigate regulatory requirements and help shift company culture around data ownership and quality.

Key Missions

• Define the multi-year vision for Data Governance and Data Quality, ensuring it scales with the global business and an evolving AI landscape.
• Act as a principal consultant to executive leadership on data governance, ensuring compliance and administration are embedded in the data product lifecycle from day one.
• Lead the design of general data architectures that address current needs and anticipate future, real-time and AI-driven requirements.

Responsibilities

• Lead governance and quality strategy across Airbnb’s data ecosystem.
• Own system-level design for complex, high-volume data ecosystems.
• Mentor engineers and raise standards for data engineering practices.
• Influence product and business direction by leveraging data integrity as a competitive advantage.

Requirements

• Deep expertise in the Java/Scala/Spark ecosystem.
• Strong knowledge of S3 and Apache Iceberg (preferred).
• Strong relational database knowledge and SQL query authoring.
• Ability to drive cultural change around data ownership and quality.
• 12+ years of industry experience leading large-scale data initiatives across multiple departments/business units.
• Experience influencing product/business strategy using data integrity.

Nice-to-Haves

• Experience with evolving architectures for real-time, AI-driven data needs.