Staff Backend Engineer (Ads Platform)

• 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

Benefits

• Paid volunteer time
• Health food and snacks
• Generous parental and family leave
• Learning and development
• Annual travel and experiences credit

• Passion to level-up those around you through curiosity and fostering a collaborative and inclusive team environment
• Bonus - Hands-on experience with paid advertising platforms (Meta, Google, or similar) — you understand how the ecosystem works, not just the engineering surface
• 9+ years of experience in a hands-on software engineering role
• 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
• Passionate about efficiency, availability, technical quality and system quality
• 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