Engineering Manager, Storage SRE

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 Storage SRE team owns the “how do you reliably run and operate databases at scale” problem. The team is at the heart of Airbnb’s online data systems, building tooling, workflows, and automation to ensure mission-critical data services are reliable, secure, and performant. You will be joining a team that operates at genuine internet scale and has direct influence on the infrastructure decisions that power a global marketplace. The team has deep operational ownership of Airbnb’s primary relational database fleet, covering the full lifecycle from provisioning and capacity planning to schema management, backup and recovery, disaster recovery, and client integration best practices. The team also improves the developer experience for engineers working with transactional data stores at scale, enabling engineers across Airbnb to work with high-traffic storage systems reliably and efficiently. Looking ahead, the team is actively expanding its tooling and operational model to support a new class of distributed database technology, partnering closely with storage infrastructure and platform teams to enable resilient adoption across Airbnb. The Difference You Will Make: Own the Storage SRE technical roadmap across a 12+ month horizon, setting the direction for how the team deepens its operational model as it takes on new database technologies alongside its existing systems Lead and grow a team of engineers by providing mentorship, timely feedback, and career development support to build a high-performing, inclusive team Drive the generalization of cluster lifecycle, schema management, and observability tooling as the team broadens its database technology support Partner with engineering teams across Airbnb as the primary expert on reliable database adoption, helping them work with mission-critical storage systems safely and efficiently at scale Establish and uphold operational excellence standards covering on-call strategy, incident response, backup and disaster recovery, and systemic reliability improvements Collaborate with storage infrastructure and platform teams to ensure Storage SRE’s tooling and observability stay current as the broader storage platform evolves Improve the developer experience for engineers working with high-traffic transactional storage systems Drive performance, security, scalability, and availability initiatives across Airbnb’s database systems Communicate technical strategy and trade-offs clearly to engineers and senior leadership Your Expertise: 9+ years of relevant industry experience in database infrastructure, storage systems, or site reliability engineering 3+ years of engineering management experience leading SRE, infrastructure, or platform teams Demonstrated track record of building high-performing teams by hiring strong engineers, developing talent, and maintaining team health through periods of change Strong technical foundation with the ability to partner with technical leads on architectural decisions, roadmap tradeoffs, and delivery quality Proven ability to lead a team through a technology transition while maintaining operational rigor on existing systems Solid understanding of distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, and production database operations Strong communicator able to cut through ambiguity and represent the team credibly to senior leadership 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. h