Staff Backend Engineer - Ads Platform

Airbnb is seeking a Staff Backend Engineer to join the Ads Platform team, which builds the AI-powered growth engine behind Airbnb's paid marketing across Google, Meta, and the broader advertising ecosystem. The team builds the platform and intelligent systems that power paid campaigns — from creative to optimization to audience — at scale across every channel, with a strong commitment to brand safety, quality, and human oversight. The ambition is to build increasingly autonomous, AI-driven marketing systems that grow Airbnb's business.

• Set technical direction for the agentic Growth Engine, making architecture decisions on systems that generate creatives, optimize bids and budgets, and manage audiences across Google, Meta, and other paid channels.
• Write and review code hands-on, establishing engineering standards for quality, availability, and system health across the platform.
• Partner with Marketing, Product, and Design to translate growth objectives into platform capabilities and define human-in-the-loop controls for safe and on-brand autonomous campaigns.
• Advance the AI-assisted → agentic → autonomous roadmap, identifying where to introduce automation next and de-risking it through experimentation and staged rollout.
• Mentor engineers and act as a force multiplier through design reviews, technical guidance, and a collaborative, inclusive culture.
• Collaborate with ML/AI and data platform teams on models and signals that feed campaign optimization, and integrate deeply with the Airbnb product to understand the customer journey.

• 9+ years of experience in a hands-on software engineering role.
• Bachelor’s and/or Master’s degree, preferably in CS, or equivalent experience.
• Technical leadership: hands-on experience leading project teams, setting technical direction and strategy, and mentoring engineers.
• Passionate about efficiency, availability, technical quality, and system quality.
• Proven experience in defining product/technical strategy and driving alignment with cross-functional leaders and stakeholders.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills with experience driving initiatives that span across teams, departments, and leadership.
• Bonus: Hands-on experience with paid advertising platforms (Meta, Google, or similar).

Base pay range: $212,000—$265,000 USD. This role may also be eligible for bonus, equity, benefits, and Employee Travel Credits.

This position is US - Remote Eligible. The role may include occasional work at an Airbnb office or attendance at offsites, as agreed with your manager. You must live in a state where Airbnb, Inc. has a registered entity; see the up-to-date list of excluded states.

Apply through the Airbnb careers page for this position.