Staff Backend Engineer - Ads Platform

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 Ads Platform team builds the AI-powered growth engine behind Airbnb's paid marketing across Google, Meta, and the broader advertising ecosystem. We build 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. Our ambition is bold: to build increasingly autonomous, AI-driven marketing systems that grow Airbnb's business.

We sit at the intersection of engineering, marketing, and AI. You'll partner closely with Marketing, Product, and Design, work alongside Airbnb's ML/AI and data platform teams, and integrate deeply with the core product to turn a rich understanding of the customer journey into differentiated, high-performing paid experiences.

As a Staff Software Engineer on the Ads Platform team, you will lead the technical strategy and hands-on execution of Airbnb's next-generation, AI-powered Growth Engine for paid channels (Google, Meta, and beyond). You will architect systems that autonomously manage the full lifecycle of paid campaigns — creative generation and rotation, bidding and budget optimization, audience management, and feed intelligence — at scale. Success looks like measurable gains in marketing efficiency (ROAS/CAC) and campaign velocity as we advance the platform along its AI-assisted → agentic → autonomous maturity curve, with the quality, brand safety, and human-in-the-loop controls that let us operate autonomously with confidence.

• Set technical direction for the agentic Growth Engine — making architecture decisions on the 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 directly with Marketing, Product, and Design to translate growth objectives into platform capabilities, and to define the human-in-the-loop controls that keep autonomous campaigns safe and on-brand.

• 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 — leveling up the team through design reviews, technical guidance, and a collaborative, inclusive culture.

• Collaborate with ML/AI and data platform teams on the 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.

• Passion to level-up those around you through curiosity and fostering a collaborative and inclusive team environment.

• Proven experience in defining product/technical strategy and driving alignment with