Senior Manager, Technical Brand & Content

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 work to achieve that mission, our cross functional Tech Operations and Programs team helps enable Tech organizations to execute and deliver on high impact programs and initiatives. The Difference You Will Make: You will decide what the engineering world knows about Airbnb. Our engineers solve hard problems at scale across infrastructure, data, and applied AI — and they write about that work well. Almost none of the engineers we’d most like to hire have ever seen it. You’ll change that, and the change is measurable. A year in, senior candidates should arrive already able to describe our technical work accurately, because they found it before we found them. Our engineers should be recognised names in their fields rather than anonymous authors. Airbnb should be the source people cite on at least one technical domain. And the strongest engineers in the market should have a reason to choose us that has nothing to do with the offer. That is a rare kind of impact for this discipline. Most tech brand roles are asked to manufacture credibility that isn’t there. Here the engineering is genuinely strong and already documented — the gap is that it doesn’t travel. You’d be building the function that closes it, with real autonomy, very little inherited process, and direct access to engineering leaders and our CTO. A Typical Day: Own the editorial engine. Run the Airbnb Tech Blog end to end: sourcing topics from teams, coaching engineer-authors, editing to a high bar, and moving posts through legal, security and comms review without letting them stall. Set and hold a publishing rhythm the org can rely on. Find the cross-team narratives. Our biggest gap is that individually strong posts never add up to a story. You’ll work across orgs to identify the themes that connect work from multiple teams, and publish them as connected sets — while each domain keeps publishing in depth for its own specialists. Build our voices. Help our engineers and technical leaders develop genuine public presence: bylines, talks, speaker coaching, and a pipeline of new voices. This includes partnering closely with our CTO to establish his public technical presence. Own distribution. Establish our canonical home on an Airbnb-owned domain, stand up the surfaces we’re missing including video, and decide what our social channels are for. Publishing well and distributing poorly is the pattern we’re here to break. Run our external presence. Set conference and event strategy — where we speak, where we sponsor, where we skip — and manage what we host ourselves. Own our academic collaborations and technical media relationships, and the budget and vendors behind all of it. Steward our open source presence. Make sure what Airbnb claims publicly is accurate and actually maintained, and that the projects carrying our name reflect how we want to be seen. Prove it works. Partner with Talent Acquisition to connect this work to hiring outcomes — inbound share of the senior pipeline, offer acceptance at staff level and above in ML and infrastructure — and be honest about what is and isn’t attributable. Your Expertise: Substantial experience in technical content, developer relations, engineering communications or technical editorial — including time spent working directly with engineers, not adjacent to them. Technical fluency. You don’t need to write production code, but you need to hold your own in a systems design conversation, read a design doc, and judge whether a draft post says anything real. Credibility with staff engineers is the difference between this role working and not working. Editorial judgment and hands-on craft. You can edit an engineer’s draft into something sharper without flattening their voice, and you know the difference between a post that teaches something and one that announces something. Influence without authority. Nothing you need is owned by you. You’ve built systems and incentives that got busy senior people to produce, rather than relying on persistence. Program discipline. You’ve owned events, budgets and vendors end to end, and you’re comfortable with the unglamorous half of the job. Measurement literacy. You connect brand work to funnel outcomes, and you’re straight about the limits of attribution rather than reaching for impressions. Judgment on risk. You’ve navigated legal and security review, and you know what shouldn’t be published as well as what should. Nice to have Experience migrating a technical publication between platforms, including the SEO and redirect work. Experience running or fixing an open source program. Experience helping a senior executive build a public technical presence. Familiarity with AI and ML engineering topics, and with academic or research communications. Video or multi-format content experience. Your Location: This position is US