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Salary: USD 164,000 - 193,000 / annual
Airbnb's Content Products team, within BizTech, is seeking a Senior Systems Engineer to build the systems powering content management across the platform. You will own major projects spanning multiple workstreams—often arriving loosely defined—and may lead a small pod of 2–3 engineers to deliver them.
Key responsibilities include:
- Deliver major projects end-to-end, taking accountability across the software development lifecycle, breaking down work, building plans, and leading engineering pods as needed.
- Partner with content, product, and engineering teams to map and improve authoring workflows, translate them into technical requirements, and deliver capabilities including reporting, integrations, and AI-assisted authoring features.
- Own technical aspects of Contentstack (enterprise headless CMS), extending it with custom React UI extensions and authoring apps aligned with Airbnb's Design Language System. Build integrations for structured taxonomy and knowledge graph capabilities; improve content organization, security, and discoverability through taxonomies, controlled vocabularies, and metadata standards.
- Design systems for reliability, security, maintainability, and observability. Identify failure modes, participate in incident response, and implement corrective actions beyond immediate fixes.
- Raise the technical bar by identifying and deprecating low-quality code, services, and frameworks. Plan quality improvements into the roadmap and provide constructive input in design and code review.
- Document technical solutions clearly, surfacing benefits, risks, and tradeoffs. Seek peer review and feedback on designs. Analyze data, form hypotheses, experiment, and iterate.
- Coach and mentor engineers inside and outside the team. Give timely, actionable feedback; help onboard new members; contribute to interviewing and the broader technical community.
- Work in agent-assisted development loops, directing AI agents to explore systems, prototype solutions, generate and review code, and validate changes while maintaining accountability for correctness and quality.
You will partner across Airbnb to meet evolving needs of everyone who creates, manages, and delivers content. The role is US Remote Eligible with occasional office work or offsites as agreed with your manager. You must live in a state where Airbnb, Inc. has a registered entity.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 5+ years designing and implementing complex systems end-to-end in integrated enterprise environments
- Proven experience building and maintaining custom author-facing tools, workflows, automations, and integrations in an enterprise headless CMS (Contentstack preferred)
- Track record of owning delivery on projects spanning multiple workstreams, including work that began without clear definition
- Depth in front-end and back-end development, preferably with TypeScript, React, and Node.js
- Strong working knowledge of large-scale content data analysis, bulk updates, and reporting; ability to process large data volumes efficiently
- Demonstrated ability to build and operate high-performance, scalable, fault-tolerant internal tooling; design for failure modes and operational requirements
- Fluency with agentic development workflows: comfortable directing AI agents to explore, prototype, implement, and review, with sound judgment about when to trust and verify output
- Clear technical writing—design documents that make benefits, risks, and tradeoffs explicit—and habit of seeking peer review
- Experience mentoring engineers and giving actionable feedback
- Comfortable navigating ambiguity and helping shape problem definitions
- Ability to drive alignment, manage projects, and collaborate effectively with technical and non-technical stakeholders
PREFERRED:
- Experience working with structured data in enterprise taxonomy or knowledge graph platforms
- Familiarity with architectural patterns of large, high-scale web applications (well-designed APIs, high-volume data pipelines, efficient algorithms)
- Experience with modern reporting or analytics platforms such as Tableau or Grafana
- BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Science or related field
