Job detail for Lead Platform Manager, Tech Foundations

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 is a vision- and mission-driven company. Our Product Managers embody this culture and mindset. They imagine the ideal end state for our community (guests and hosts) and work backward from it, challenging current assumptions. They champion winning strategies, leverage metrics to track progress, and partner with talented cross-functional teammates (engineering, design, data science, and more). Highly hands-on, they are never afraid to roll up their sleeves to deliver the right outcome for our community. If you’re excited to help us create a world where anyone can belong anywhere, we’d love to meet you.

The Difference You Will Make

As a Lead Product Manager for Developer Productivity, you will own the product areas developers rely on, and you will own something harder: the end-to-end workflows that determine how productive our engineers actually are. Those workflows cross organizational boundaries — a single developer journey can touch other parts of the infrastructure, reliability, developer experience, and security. Your job is to understand the end-to-end developer journey, find where it breaks, and drive the work to fix it whether or not the fix lives in your teams.

You will define what developer productivity means at Airbnb, instrument it, and be accountable for moving it. In collaboration with business stakeholders, product marketing, and technical program managers, you will help shape the roadmap for these products, with an emphasis on bringing together disparate offerings into a cohesive infrastructure roadmap.This will include the creation and ownership of Product Requirements Documents (PRDs) and Business Requirements Documents (BRDs) to inform technical decisions. You will also partner with engineers, designers, data scientists, and field-operations teams to scale our solutions across existing and emerging business segments, ensuring a cohesive system view.

A Typical Day

• Establish product vision and northstar for your area, and connect it into the broader developer productivity strategy
• Own cross-cutting developer workflows end to end — mapping where they break across pillars like App & Cloud Infra, Reliability Engineering, and Developer Experience, and driving the changes that improve them
• Define how we measure developer productivity: build the metrics, instrumentation, and qualitative research that tell us whether engineers' lives are actually getting better
• Partner with Engineering, Product, TPM, and Data Science to understand goals and establish success criteria with clearly measurable objectives and key results
• Develop the product roadmap, and get alignment on prioritization and timelines to meet business goals
• Influence teams you don't own — build the case, bring the data, and get other groups to prioritize developer productivity work alongside their own roadmaps
• Develop a deep understanding of how Airbnb's engineers work day to day, and of the technical architecture underneath, to build and improve products that fit into real workflows rather than around them
• Execute efficiently to ship products and deliver impact for our business and users.
• Lead cross-functional groups to fulfill the team’s mission, acting as the system voice.
• Communicate concisely and influence outcomes at all levels of the organization, demonstrating strong executive presence.

Your Expertise

• 10+ years of product management experience building tools and platforms for technical users — developer tooling, infrastructure, or platform products
• Track record of improving developer or engineering productivity, with the measurements to prove it
• Experience defining and metrics for hard-to-quantify outcomes — when quantitative metrics are needed and matter, and when qualitative metrics may or may not be more impactful
• Strong understanding of technical architecture for complex and highly scalable systems, and of modern AI-powered developer workflows: AI-assisted development, code review, CI/CD, build systems, testing, deployment
• Demonstrated ability to drive outcomes across organizational boundaries without direct authority — influencing roadmaps you don't own
• Ability to understand immediate and longer-term customer goals and needs, and build products that meet them
• Entrepreneurial drive, and demonstrated ability to lead and influence cross-functional teams to align on a vision and product strategy
• Ability to quickly absorb technical concepts and communicate effectively with technical and non-technical partners at every level of the organization
• Ability to prioritize and scope user requests and platform capabilities, balancing long-term vision against short-term pain points
• Previous experience as a software engineer, or working extremely closely with engineering teams, is a strong plus
• Familiarity with developer productivity research and frameworks (DORA, SPACE, DevEx) is a plus
• Storytelling skills that connect the problem you’re solving to a compelling vision, coupled with a willingness to dive into the details.

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: @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.

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.