Senior Manager, Content & Knowledge Architecture

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. The Community You Will Join: Airbnb is a mission-driven company dedicated to helping create a world where anyone can belong anywhere. It takes a unified team committed to our core values to achieve this goal. Airbnb’s various functions embody the company’s innovative spirit, and our fast-moving team is committed to leading as a 21st century company. The Content & Knowledge Management (CKM) team that you would join makes accurate and authoritative information available at scale by creating, editing, and managing metadata and support content—including the public Help Center and internal knowledge bases—used by customers, CS agents, and consuming applications, including AI chatbots. The Difference You Will Make: The Senior Manager, Content & Knowledge Architecture will help establish and evolve the emerging discipline of content engineering—designing, structuring, delivering, and managing content so it’s strategic, scalable, consumable across surfaces, and efficiently adjusted, rather than a collection of one-off articles or chunks—within our organization. In this leadership role, you'll own CKM inputs and influence infrastructure that construct and ingest an information layer, which serves various audiences and product surfaces. You will own decisions that determine how knowledge is created, updated, architected, organized, stored, retrieved, and surfaced. You'll also steer the cross-functional coordination that keeps CKM content aligned with product launches and other business developments or needs. You’ll lead the teams who run taxonomy and ontology, content tooling and AI-focused optimization, as well as content operations planning. You’ll be accountable for how well they perform together: setting direction, clarifying who owns what, and developing the leaders and teams who make it work. We seek someone who sees how systems underneath our content — taxonomy, tooling, authoring processes, information architecture, and operational planning — increasingly determine whether that content reaches the people and machines that need it. You should understand how user-facing content, metadata, measurement and authoring systems, and consuming applications all depend on each other, and you can spot where inconsistency in one area will eventually break something in another. Most importantly, you should view these as a cohesive unit, not several separate functions that happen to share a roof. A Typical Day: • Define and champion the evolving discipline of content engineering within CKM, establishing standards for how knowledge is structured, stored, and delivered across surfaces and applications. • Own the roadmap for metadata, taxonomy, and information architecture that determines how content is organized, discovered, and reused. • Partner with Product and Engineering to define and prioritize tooling investment that improves content quality, efficiency, and innovation. • Establish governance frameworks that embed standards and quality checks directly into content creation, review, and publishing workflows. • Define the metrics and reporting that give leadership visibility into content health, coverage, and performance, as well as authoring efficiency. • Steer cross-functional coordination that keeps CKM content aligned with product launches and other business needs. • Lead and develop the managers and senior team members in your group: set clear goals, give candid feedback, and hold each accountable for results. • Own talent decisions for the group, including hiring, calibration, promotion, and succession planning, applying clear leveling criteria so people are developed and recognized fairly. • Define roles and ownership across taxonomy and ontology, tooling and AI-focused optimization, and content operations planning, so everyone in the group knows what they own, what they influence, and where work hands off. • Set priorities and allocate resources and capacity across the group’s programs and roadmap. • Coach managers on team design and career development for their own teams, and help senior team members grow toward their next role. Sponsor a diverse group of talent and model Airbnb’s belonging behaviors. • Build strategic relationships with senior leaders across Product, Engineering, Analytics, and Design, among others, to ensure knowledge systems keep pace with company-wide priorities. • Champion a culture of technical and data fluency, editorial and operational excellence, and continuous improvement across a diverse team. Your Expertise: • 12+ years of progressive experience in content strategy, content operations, or knowledge management, including substantial experience with content systems, taxonomy, and/or information architecture at scale. • 5+ years of managing managers, with a track record of developing high-performing, distributed teams, and steering them toward a shared strategy and standard. • Hands-on experience owning talent decisions, including hiring, performance management, calibration, and succession planning. • Experience in customer support, contact center operations, or a similar global service organization is a plus. • Advanced degree in a relevant discipline (Computer Science, Information Science, Technical Writing, or similar) — or equivalent practical experience. • Deep expertise in content strategy, knowledge management, and information architecture, with a demonstrated understanding of AI/ML applications in content operations. • Expert knowledge of content management systems and authoring tooling; practical experience with AI-powered content optimization. • Comfortable partnering