Staff Backend Engineer - Ads Platform

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About the role

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: 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. The Difference You Will Make: 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. A Typical Day: 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 t...

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