Senior Data Engineer, Foundational Data

the company 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:

At the company, our mission is to create a world where anyone can belong anywhere. The Foundational Data team builds and operates the high-quality, widely reused datasets that power critical decisions across the company: how visitors are measured from site traffic, how bot traffic is separated from organic traffic, and how cloud costs are attributed to the company services. Our cost dashboards are among the most-used at the company, relied on by technical leads, finance, and executives.

Every dollar the company spends running its infrastructure is attributed by models this team owns.

We are now building a third pillar, and it puts this team at the forefront of how the company measures AI: the cost, usage, and performance of the models we train and serve ourselves, and of the AI tools our own engineers use every day. When the company asks whether an AI investment is paying off, the answer comes from datasets this team builds.

Foundational Data sits inside Cloud Infrastructure and is a deliberate mix of Data Engineers and Analytics Engineers working as one team.

The Difference You Will Make:

As a Senior Staff Data Engineer, you are the technical leader for this team and the person who sets its direction. This is a hands-on role with no direct reports: you will own the long-term data architecture and you will build against it, from the Airflow-orchestrated pipelines that ingest telemetry, logs, and billing data through to the dimensional models and Minerva definitions that thousands of people at the company reason with.

Because we are a mixed DE and AE team, you will work across both disciplines: this role needs data engineering depth, plus enough fluency in metric and dimensional modeling to set direction for the analytics engineering side.

Infrastructure intelligence is where you will start, and it is fresh ground. The signals describing our fleets are fragmented across cost, utilization telemetry, service performance, and GPU and model telemetry. Nobody has modeled this coherently yet, and the AI side is the least charted part of all. There is no schema to inherit. You would decide what these datasets are, then bring the rest of the company along.

This work carries regular visibility to directors and VPs across Infrastructure and Finance.

A Typical Day:

• Provide technical leadership across the team's data engineering and analytics engineering work, spanning cloud cost, traffic & bots, and infrastructure intelligence
• Define and own the multi-year data strategy and architecture for the company's foundational data assets, and build the cross-org consensus needed to fund and execute it
• Own how the company measures its AI: the unit economics of training and serving our own models, GPU fleet utilization, and the cost and adoption of developer AI tooling
• Design and build the datasets that integrate cost, utilization, performance, and reliability signals across the company's infrastructure fleets, starting from a blank page
• Stay hands-on in the pipelines and models you architect, close enough to the build to catch the problems design reviews miss
• Influence and coach a distributed team of Data Engineers and Analytics Engineers, raising the quality bar through design and code review and scaling it by building the frameworks and automated checks other teams adopt
• Navigate conflicting stakeholder requirements across Infrastructure, Finance, Data Science, and Product Engineering, and land a single definition everyone can build on
• Identify and eliminate duplication and data fragmentation across the engineering organization, driving deprecation of what your models replace
• Participate in the team's on-call rotation for the datasets we own

Your Expertise:

You do not need prior experience with cloud cost, infrastructure, or AI/ML data to succeed here. What we cannot teach is the following.

• 12+ years of relevant industry experience with a BS/Masters, or 9+ years with a PhD, in data engineering or a closely related field
• You have designed, built, and operated production data pipelines at large scale, and you write strong SQL and Python. Scala experience is useful but…