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Airbnb

Senior

Lead the team running Airbnb's distributed workflow orchestration infrastructure

This EM role owns a team building and operating the orchestration layer coordinating tens of thousands of daily data workflows across Airbnb's Data Infrastructure org. Requires 5+ years of engineering leadership managing distributed-systems teams and direct experience with orchestration frameworks like Airflow, Dagster, Flyte, Prefect, or Maestro. Strong target for EM interview prep in data-platform/orchestration-engine domains.

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What this interview tests

  • Distributed systems and workflow orchestration engines at scale (Airflow, Dagster, Flyte, Prefect, Maestro)
  • Scaling, observability, and multi-tenancy challenges in orchestration infrastructure
  • Defining multi-year technical vision/roadmap aligned to a broader data platform strategy
  • Cross-functional partnership across Data Platform, Compute, Storage, Analytics, ML Infra
  • Engineering leadership: coaching, hiring, and delivery discipline/on-call readiness for critical infra

Common question themes

How would you scale an orchestration platform running tens of thousands of daily workflows

Tell me about driving adoption of a workflow paradigm across resistant engineering teams

How do you review an architectural design for a distributed orchestration system

Describe a multi-tenancy or observability challenge you solved in a scheduling/orchestration system

How do you balance reliability, developer experience, and cost when prioritizing infra investments

Tell me about mentoring an engineer through a hard technical decision on distributed systems

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