Staff AI Innovation Engineer, Employee Experience

The Community You Will Join: 

The Tools & Technologies Experience (TNT) team sits at the center of Airbnb’s digital employee experience transformation. We bring together engineering, product thinking, business processes, and knowledge management to reimagine how employees interact with their work. Our mission is to make internal tools smarter, workflows more seamless, and employee decisions more data-driven and personalized.

As part of TNT, you’ll join a curious, collaborative, and ambitious team committed to building the future of employee experience through the strategic use of AI.

The Difference You Will Make:

In this role, you will architect the next generation of Airbnb’s internal operating system by designing and building intelligent, AI-powered solutions that address real Employee Experience (EX) pain points. You will translate ambiguous HR and workforce needs into scalable products, stitch together systems and data flows, and rapidly build prototypes that demonstrate what’s possible.

You’ll be expected to move fluidly between engineering, product strategy, systems architecture, and narrative storytelling. You’ll independently build working prototypes - agent flows, lightweight apps, LLM-driven assistants - that can progress from concept to stakeholder testing in days, not months, and that can evolve into production-ready solutions with minimal lift from partner teams.

This is a highly entrepreneurial role that requires zooming between high-level EX systems thinking and hands-on implementation. You’ll partner closely with EX, BizTech, Legal, Privacy, and InfoSec to ensure solutions are innovative, ethical, and securely designed.

A Typical Day: 

• Translate employee and manager workflows into well-defined AI product opportunities
• Rapidly prototype and test working solutions (LLM agents, workflow automations, microapps, embedded tools, etc.)
• Architect systems integrations across our HR tech stack (Workday, Greenhouse, Qualtrics, Airtable, RightAnswers, Asana, and more)
• Lead discovery sessions with stakeholders to uncover automation and augmentation opportunities
• Evaluate third-party AI tools and determine build vs. buy options
• Design and execute fast-cycle pilots across knowledge management, decision support, communications, and resource planning
• Define success metrics, measure impact, and iterate based on user feedback
• Translate complex AI architectures into clear narratives that help stakeholders understand value and adoption paths
• Ensure alignment with Airbnb’s privacy, security, and ethical AI guardrails
  Continuously evolve EX’s AI strategy as organizational needs and technologies shift

Your Expertise: 

• 9+ years in product management, AI engineering, and/or platform architecture, with hands-on experience building and launching AI/ML-powered products
• Proven 0→1 builder with extensive experience developing GenAI prototypes, tools, and platforms from scratch
  Ability to produce functional prototypes (using Claude Code or similar) within hours and stakeholder-ready demos within days
• Strong systems-thinking skills with the ability to map complex workflows, diagnose root causes, and design buildable solutions
  Expertise in prompt engineering, context orchestration, and adapting LLM behavior to different users, workflows, and decision contexts
  Data-informed decision-maker who can define success criteria, measure ROI, and refine models and workflows
• Skilled in communicating technical concepts to non-technical audiences
  Highly collaborative, systems-oriented, and adept at connecting dots across people, tools, and processes
• Strong visual and narrative communication skills (Figma, Miro, slideware)
• Portfolio of prototypes or relevant 0→1 work preferred but not required