Engineering Manager, Control Plane - Distributed Transactional Database
AirbnbUnited StatesPosted 24 February 2026
Job Description
<div class="content-intro"><p><span style="font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">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.</span></p></div><p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; color: #000000;"><strong>The Community You Will Join: </strong></span></p>
<p>The Distributed Transactional Database team within Airbnb’s Online Data is responsible for building and operating a new source-of-truth, horizontally scalable, open-source NewSql database as the unified backend for all of Airbnb’s Online Data workloads. With users around the world, scalability, reliability, efficiency, usability and long-term platform viability are our team’s core missions.</p>
<p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; color: #000000;"> </span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; color: #000000;"><strong>The Difference You Will Make:</strong></span></p>
<p>As an engineering manager for the Control Plane team under Distributed Transactional Database org, you’ll lead a team of talented, diverse software engineers to build software to make database operations (deployment, cluster provisioning and restore, rolling restarts, configuration, scaling) reliable and automated, and to make the open-source database well-integrated with Airbnb’s Compute, Networking and Security infrastructure.</p>
<p>A few examples of control plane services that the team owns:</p>
<ul>
<li>Orchestration logic that handles node lifecycles of database’s storage, compute, metadata management nodes. <a href="https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering/achieving-high-availability-with-distributed-database-on-kubernetes-at-airbnb-58cc2e9856f4">(Blog link</a>)</li>
<li>Operator that automates cluster provisioning, operations and restore. </li>
<li>Configuration management that detects and auto-fixes unexpected configuration drifts. </li>
<li>Open source DevX: Make open-source development and testing (image building/testing, CICD, load testing and performance certification) frictionless.</li>
<li>Blue/green deployment and rollback strategy for major version upgrades.</li>
<li>In the future, strives towards the direction of platformization, providing the correct constructs and semantics for customers to self-manage their databases and keep the org’s KTLO and toil factor manageable.</li>
</ul>
<p>Each manager brings their own unique skill set, experiences, thought leadership and technical expertise to solve these technical challenges for Airbnb. You will work closely with your peers within Online Data, many other partners in Airbnb Product teams, as well as Infra teams in Compute, Networking, Security, Reliability across the company and with external vendors.</p>
<p><strong style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">A Typical Day: </strong></p>
<ul>
<li>Work with TL and team to define and execute on a vision and 3-year roadmap for the control plane area.</li>
<li>Stay in touch with technical designs and decisions, be the sounding board.</li>
<li>Synthesize technical information and represent the team with upper management.</li>
<li>Align with ORM and SRE teams in Online Data on each team’s charter and how each team’s core capabilities fit together.</li>
<li>Attract top talent, mentor individual contributors and manage their promotions and career.</li>
<li>Nurture a culture of rigor and responsibly “moving fast” from design, through code review, to production.</li>
<li>Represent Airbnb with open source communities and external alliance partners.</li>
</ul>
<p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; color: #000000;"><strong>Your Expertise:</strong></span></p>
<ul>
<li>3+ years of eng ... (truncated, view full listing at source)
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