Senior Manager, Technical Program Management (Data, Reliability & Developer Experience)

Airbnb
United States
On-site

Who this role is best for

A natural match if you have experience leading cross-functional technical programs in data infrastructure and reliability engineering.

Best fit for

  • Candidates with 12+ years in technical program management and a track record of leading large-scale platform migrations
    — “12+ years in technical program management, software engineering, or SRE, including 5+ years leading and mentoring TPMs or managers of TPMs”
  • Individuals who have built infrastructure for AI workloads or AI-assisted engineering and can demonstrate ownership of complex projects
    — “Experience delivering infrastructure for AI workloads or AI-assisted engineering”
  • Candidates with deep expertise in distributed data systems and cloud infrastructure, and a focus on cross-team collaboration
    — “Strong technical grounding in at least two of: distributed data systems (Spark, Trino, Flink/Kafka, Iceberg), Kubernetes and cloud infrastructure”

Things to consider

  • The role demands leadership over a team of senior TPMs and requires creating a culture of inclusiveness and sustainability
    — “creating a culture of inclusiveness and sustainability”
  • This position involves working with senior ICs and engineering directors across the company, requiring high-level collaboration skills
    — “partner closely with senior ICs and engineering directors across Airbnb on processes, strategy, and execution”

How to stand out

  • Highlight experience in leading multi-team platform migrations and deprecations with measurable outcomes
    — “track record of leading multi-quarter, multi-team platform migrations or deprecations at scale”
  • Emphasize your ability to define and secure stakeholder alignment on clear success metrics
    — “Define and secure stakeholder alignment on clear, measurable success criteria”
  • Showcase your deep knowledge of progressive delivery, canary, and automated rollback practices
    — “Deep familiarity with progressive delivery, canary and automated rollback practices”
  • Demonstrate your capability to lead infrastructure planning rhythms like OKRs and dependency mapping
    — “Own Infrastructure planning rhythms (OKRs, roadmap reviews, dependency mapping)”
  • Frame your experience in terms of resolving ambiguity and delivering strategic outcomes with technical rigor
    — “Demonstrated ability to work through ambiguity to detailed solutions”
Pace · SteadyCollaboration · HighAutonomy · MediumDecision Impact · Company

Derived from job-description analysis by Serendipath's career intelligence engine.

What success looks like

  • drive multi-org programs
  • ensure robust, highly available, and transparent operations
  • align teams and resolve dependencies
Typical background
robust technical backgroundexperience in infrastructure engineering

Skills & requirements

Required

Technical Program ManagementMulti-organizational CollaborationProject PlanningRisk ManagementStakeholder Alignment

Preferred

Functional Programming LanguagesStrong Writing Skills

Stack & domain

Technical Program ManagementData InfrastructureReliability EngineeringDeveloper ExperienceCommunicationInterpersonal SkillsFinance

About the role

Original posting from Airbnb

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 mission is to create a world where people can Belong Anywhere. As we grow to achieve that mission, we're looking to add a technical, hands-on, and mission-driven Senior Manager of Technical Program Management (TPM) for the Infrastructure TPM team. You will lead a team of TPMs driving multi-org programs across Data Infrastructure, Reliability Engineering, and Developer Experience.

Data Infrastructure builds the batch, streaming, and real-time data and feature platforms, semantic metrics layer, and query engines that power analytics, experimentation, and ML, and is making the data stack AI-ready and cost-efficient at scale.

Reliability Engineering provides the observability, alerting, incident response, and deployment-safety platforms (progressive delivery and automated rollback) that keep Airbnb highly available and resilient.

Developer Experience scales the end-to-end developer workflow, including source control, CI, build, code review, deployment, and cloud development environments, so engineers and AI agents can ship quality software quickly and safely. 

In this role, you will collaborate closely with data, infrastructure, and product teams across Airbnb to develop holistic solutions that ensure the Airbnb platform is robust, highly available, and transparent in its operations. You will partner closely with senior ICs and engineering directors across Airbnb on processes, strategy, and execution.

We are looking for a candidate with a robust technical background who deeply understands the problem space, drives requirements, and leverages their infrastructure engineering expertise to resolve strategic challenges that align with Airbnb’s larger goals.

The Difference You Will Make:

Our team of TPMs demonstrate ownership, apply skills in whatever combination necessary, and make order out of chaos to achieve the desired outcome. We work hard to ensure teams understand what they have to deliver and by when. We are responsible for aligning teams, identifying or highlighting dependencies, recognizing and resolving ambiguity, setting expectations, anticipating risk, identifying and removing roadblocks, and ensuring the desired business goals are achieved. We are looking for people who share our passion for tackling complexity head-on while building a world class team of Technical Program Managers.   

A Typical Day: 

Shape and influence the technical direction of projects, ensuring we meet stakeholder needs while maintaining high-quality standards.

Drive phased rollouts and large-scale platform migrations, from pilot through adoption to deprecation, with clear exit criteria and minimal disruption to product teams.

Balance broad, outcome-driven thinking with attention to critical details, exercising sound judgment to prioritize where deep focus is necessary to ensure successful execution.

Define and secure stakeholder alignment on clear, measurable success criteria, such as availability and SLOs, CI and merge latency, cost per workload, and adoption, and hold programs accountable to them.

Regularly assess risks and opportunities, and devise proactive mitigation strategies to maintain momentum and project success.

Maintain transparent and effective communication channels to keep stakeholders informed of progress, developments, and challenges.

Expertly present outcomes and updates to senior leadership, clearly and comprehensively articulating trade-offs, risks, and emerging opportunities.

Hire, develop, and coach a team of senior TPMs, and set operating standards for planning, execution, and portfolio reporting across Infrastructure.

Lead programs that prepare infrastructure for AI-driven scale, from CI, source control, and merge systems that absorb higher change volume to agentic developer workflows and AI-ready data platforms.

Partner with engineering and finance on infrastructure efficiency programs, including utilization, cost attribution, and workload-normalized cost reduction.

Drive cross-org reliability programs such as incident review follow-through, SLO adoption, and deployment-safety rollouts.

Own Infrastructure planning rhythms (OKRs, roadmap reviews, dependency mapping) across Data, Reliability, and Developer Experience.

Your Expertise:

12+ years in technical program management, software engineering, or SRE, including 5+ years leading and mentoring TPMs or managers of TPMs, creating a culture of inclusiveness and sustainability

Demonstrated ability to work through ambiguity to detailed solutions. You can take a vague problem, crisply frame the challenge, identify a path forward, ramp up quickly on new technologies, and drive an initiative over the finish line.

Strong technical grounding in at least two of: distributed data systems (Spark, Trino, Flink/Kafka, Iceberg), Kubernetes and cloud infrastructure, observability platforms, or CI/CD, build systems, and monorepos.

Track record of leading multi-quarter, multi-team platform migrations or deprecations at scale.

Self-motivated, proactive and proven ability to adapt well and work with teams having different operating cadences.

Sound business judgment, a proven ability to influence others, strong analytical skills, and a track record of taking ownership, leading data driven analyses, and influencing results

Experience delivering infrastructure for AI workloads or AI-assisted engineering, such as feature platforms, LLM gateways, agentic developer tooling, or scaling CI/CD for AI-generated code.

Deep familiarity with progressive delivery, canary and automated rollback practices, SLOs and error budgets, and incident management.

Excellent written and oral business communication and people skills, with the ability to influence stakeholders.

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. has a registered entity. Click here for the up-to-date list of excluded states. This list is continuously evolving, so please check back with us if the state you live in is on the exclusion list. If your position is employed by another Airbnb entity, your recruiter will inform you what states you are eligible to work from.

Our Commitment To Inclusion & Belonging:

Airbnb is committed to working with the broadest talent pool possible. We believe diverse ideas foster innovation and engagement, and allow us to attract creatively-led people, and to develop the best products, services and solutions. All qualified individuals are encouraged to apply.

We strive to also provide a disability inclusive application and interview process. If you are a candidate with a disability and require reasonable accommodation in order to submit an application, please contact us at: reasonableaccommodations@airbnb.com. Please include your full name, the role you’re applying for and the accommodation necessary to assist you with the recruiting process. 

We ask that you only reach out to us if you are a candidate whose disability prevents you from being able to complete our online application.

Equal Employment Opportunity:

Airbnb values diversity & belonging and is proud to be an Equal Employment Opportunity employer. All individuals seeking employment at Airbnb are considered without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, age, gender, sex, marital status, ancestry, physical or mental disability, veteran status, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, or any other legally protected characteristic.

How We'll Take Care of You:

Our job titles may span more than one career level. The actual base pay is dependent upon many factors, such as: training, transferable skills, work experience, business needs and market demands. The base pay range is subject to change and may be modified in the future. This role may also be eligible for bonus, equity, benefits, and Employee Travel Credits.  

Pay Range$232,000—$282,000 USD 

Reasonable Accommodations: We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations throughout the recruitment process for applicants with disabilities. If you need assistance, or an accommodation, please let your recruiter know once you are contacted about a role.

A Note on Recruiting Scams: Scammers sometimes pose as Airbnb recruiters to get money or personal information from candidates. A few things that will always be true for Airbnb’s hiring process: our open roles are posted on Airbnb’s Career’s Page at careers.airbnb.com, and our recruiters correspond only from @airbnb.com or @ext.airbnb.com email addresses. Our recruiters will never ask for your Social Security number, bank account details, passport, or payment app information while you are interviewing.  We’ll also never ask you to pay a fee, send money, deposit or cash a check, or purchase work-related equipment (such as a company laptop) during the interview process. We encourage candidates to remain vigilant of these recruiting scams and not share sensitive information if you do not believe an individual is actually affiliated with Airbnb.

Source: Airbnb careers

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