Staff Technical Program Manager
Airbnb was born in 2007 when two Hosts welcomed three guests to their San Francisco home, and has since grown to over 4 million Hosts who have welcomed more than 1 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.
Airbnb’s mission is to create a world where people can Belong Anywhere. As we grow to achieve that mission, we’re looking to add a technical, hands-on, and mission-driven Staff Technical Program Manager (TPM) to the Payments Platform team.
In this role, you will work on various complex projects/ programs that touch multiple services, functions, and teams. Hence, you are required to keep the big picture in focus while diving into the details, working through unique challenges we face daily. It is a highly leveraged role that aims to improve the quality and velocity of work across cross-functional teams by acting as a “force multiplier.”
The Staff TPM role includes managing project schedules, identifying risks, discussing the technical trade-offs with engineers, and maintaining clear communications across multiple stakeholder groups across the organisation. In addition, you will make work repeatable by creating and improving processes where applicable.
In short, you will get things done by bringing clarity out of chaos, diving into the details, and communicating clearly and promptly. In addition, you are good at building relationships, motivating others with vision, and persuading with data.
About Payments Platform at Airbnb
Airbnb Payments team allows any two people in the world to frictionlessly exchange money with easy to use payments services. It is a core strategy to fulfill Airbnb’s belongs anywhere mission.We are building a world-class payments platform that moves billions of dollars, in 191 countries, with 75 currencies, through a complex ecosystem of payments partners. We build and maintain our own in-house global payments platform because no solution exists with the global reach needed. As the platform grows we’ll be adding new payment partners, global licenses, compliance and regulation controls, and building new payment experiences for our guests and hosts.
Responsibilities:
- Develop program structure and objectives, drive collaboration and alignment with all relevant stakeholders to ensure technical feasibility, and effectively drive end-to-end projects.
- Drive accountability and ownership in a fast-paced environment.
- Ensure strong collaboration within multiple parts of the organization and highlight competing priorities.
- Active role in aligning on staffing, priorities, and technical dependencies within Payments and cross-functional teams in terms of quarterly planning and managing ongoing risk escalation/ mitigation, which could impact the success of the programs.
- To ensure accountability and timeline management, manage effective communications to leadership and across teams on critical decisions, status, and risks.
- Understand best practices, drive for process improvements, and find new operating ways, focusing on simplification and productivity.
- Provide visibility into key performance indicators, so leaders know risks and opportunities.
- Work closely with engineering leadership to define goals, strategy, and plan roadmap to steer engineering teams to achieve excellence in performance and cost optimizations.
- Manage a broad set of stakeholders, ongoing communication of the right content to the appropriate audience (technical and non-technical).
- Provide visibility into performance and cost indicators, so leaders know risks and opportunities.
- Increase team productivity by identifying and removing obstacles and keeping processes lean.
Preferred Qualifications:
- BA/BS degree, 5-7 years of experience as a TPM, with 10+ years of industry experience.
- Familiar with backend service development and service-oriented architecture. Understanding end-to-end service interaction and its impact on application performance.
- Detail-oriented and able to understand the bigger picture by using your technical expertise and problem-solving abilities to prioritize and manage blocking issues.
- Demonstrate the ability to learn new technologies quickly with minimal lag time.
- Experience working in a highly cross-functional environment where communication with multiple groups is imperative.
- Demonstrate ability to work through ambiguity to detailed solutions. You can take a vague problem, crisply frame the challenge, identify a path forward, and drive an initiative over the finish line.
- Demonstrate excellent written and oral business communication and people skills, with the ability to influence stakeholders.
- Exhibit knowledge of Jira or other equivalent task management tooling.
- Prior experience in digital payments and regulated products in tech, is a plus.
Skills
- Proven track record of managing several large-scale, complex technical roll-outs for large scale cloud-hosted web applications.
- Demonstrated ability to work through ambiguity to detailed solutions. You can take a vague problem, crisply frame the challenge, identify a path forward, and drive an initiative over the finish-line.
- Self-motivated, proactive and proven ability to adapt well and work with teams having different operating cadences.
- Takes the initiative to develop process and project structure where little exists
- Detail-oriented and able to understand the bigger picture by using your technical expertise and problem solving abilities to prioritize and manage blocking issues.
- Experience working in a highly cross-functional environment where communication with multiple groups is imperative.
- Ability to ramp up quickly and learn new technologies with minimal lag time.
- Experience with Jira & Confluence
- Smartsheets Reports/Dashboards