Engineering Manager, UI Tooling

The Community You Will Join: 

The UI Foundation team has a deep history at Airbnb, responsible for the design system, accessibility, motion, and the tooling that connects how Airbnb designs and builds products. Within UI Foundation, the UI Tooling team is the connective tissue between Airbnb's Design Language System and the day-to-day workflows of hundreds of designers and engineers across the company.

UI Tooling owns the platforms, integrations, and tooling that power how designers and engineers work — spanning design tooling, UI engineering workflow tooling, collaboration platforms, and increasingly, AI-powered workflows across all three. As AI enablement for designers and engineers accelerates, this team sits at the center of some of Airbnb's most strategic infrastructure investments.

The Difference You Will Make:

As the Engineering Manager of UI Tooling, you will provide the dedicated leadership this team needs to execute with consistency, clarity, and long-term strategic direction. You'll manage and develop a team of engineers, own the multi-year roadmap across UI Tooling's core areas, and serve as a cross-functional partner to Design, Product, and AI teams driving the next generation of designer and engineer enablement at Airbnb.

This role directly unblocks UI Foundation's broader ambitions. With you in this role, the team gains the focus and stability it needs to move fast on initiatives that have a blast radius across every team at Airbnb that builds products.

You will own strategy and execution across five key areas:

• AI Usage of the Design System: Figma Code Connections and Integrations, UI Development Skills and Agents, Prototyping Skills and Agents, Design Skills and Agents
• Core UI Development Workflow & Tooling: Component development and documentation tooling, design-to-code platforms, migration tooling
• Core Design Workflow & Tooling: Internal design platforms, Figma enablement, design tooling and Figma plugins
• Collaboration Workflow & Tooling: Motion spec tooling and core motion frameworks, prototyping platform contributions and tools
• Education and Adoption: Enabling designers, engineers to be properly educated in the tools we’re providing and ensuring adoption of those tools

A Typical Day: 

Strategic Leadership:

• Define multi-year technical roadmaps for UI Tooling with clear, measurable outcomes tied to UI Foundation goals
• Drive adoption of AI-powered design-to-code workflows across Design and Engineering, establishing Airbnb as a leader in this space
• Build cross-functional alignment with Figma, product teams, and AI/ML partners to advance Airbnb's designer and engineer enablement capabilities
• Represent UI Tooling in org-level planning and investment conversations, shaping prioritization and surfacing dependencies across UI Foundation

Day-to-Day Execution:

• Lead, develop, and grow a team of engineers working across design tooling, developer experience, and AI-powered workflows
• Partner with design and engineering leaders to identify workflow pain points and prioritize the highest-leverage tooling investments
• Guide technical decisions across the team — from platform architecture to AI integration patterns — bringing a senior engineering point of view to system design
• Manage staffing, prioritization, and execution consistency, driving clarity and unblocking work across long-horizon platform investments
• Mentor and develop engineers on the team, supporting career growth and raising the technical bar
• Foster an inclusive team culture grounded in psychological safety and high performance

Your Expertise:

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, with 5+ years in an engineering management role leading platform, tooling, or design systems teams
• Strong technical foundation in frontend or cross-platform development, with the depth to engage credibly on architecture decisions
• Track record of driving long-horizon platform investments from strategy through execution, with strong cross-organizational influence and stakeholder management
• Experience building or leading developer experience, design tooling, or design system infrastructure at scale
• Familiarity with Figma's ecosystem — plugins, Dev Mode, Code Connections, or similar design-to-code workflows
• Commitment to inclusive leadership and creating environments where engineers can do their best work
• [Bonus] Experience working with AI-powered developer or designer tooling, or integrating LLM capabilities into product workflows

Your Location:

This position is US - Remote Eligible. The role may include occasional work at an Airbnb office or attendance at offsites, as agreed to with your manager. While the position is Remote Eligible, you must live in a state where Airbnb, Inc. has a registered entity. Click here for the up-to-date list of excluded states. This list is continuously evolving, so please check back with us if the state you live in is on the exclusion list. If your position is employed by another Airbnb entity, your recruiter will inform you what states you are eligible to work from. 

Our Commitment To Inclusion & Belonging:

Airbnb is committed to working with the broadest talent pool possible. We believe diverse ideas foster innovation and engagement, and allow us to attract creatively-led people, and to develop the best products, services and solutions. All qualified individuals are encouraged to apply.

We strive to also provide a disability inclusive application and interview process. If you are a candidate with a disability and require reasonable accommodation in order to submit an application, please contact us at: [email protected]. Please include your full name, the role you’re applying for and the accommodation necessary to assist you with the recruiting process. 

We ask that you only reach out to us if you are a candidate whose disability prevents you from being able to complete our online application.