Senior Manager, Content & Knowledge Architecture

California, United States, Oregon, United States, Washington, United States·Posted today

<div class="content-intro">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.</div>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:  <ul> <li>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.</li> <li>Own the roadmap for metadata, taxonomy, and information architecture that determines how content is organized, discovered, and reused.</li> <li>Partner with Product and Engineering to define and prioritize tooling investment that improves content quality, efficiency, and innovation.</li> <li>Establish governance frameworks that embed standards and quality checks directly into content creation, review, and publishing workflows.</li> <li>Define the metrics and reporting that give leadership visibility into content health, coverage, and performance, as well as authoring efficiency.</li> <li>Steer cross-functional coordination that keeps CKM content aligned with product launches and other business needs.</li> <li>Lead and develop the managers and senior team members in your group: set clear goals, give candid feedback, and hold each accountable for results.</li> <li>Own talent decisions for the group, including hiring, calibration, promotion, and succession planning, applying clear leveling criteria so people are developed and recognized fairly.</li> <li>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. </li> <li>Set priorities and allocate resources and capacity across the group’s programs and roadmap.</li> <li>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.</li> <li>Build strategic relationships with senior leaders across Product, Engineering, Analytics, and Design, among others, to ensure knowledge systems keep pace with company-wide priorities.</li> <li>Champion a culture of technical and data fluency, editorial and operational excellence, and continuous improvement across a diverse team.</li> </ul> Your Expertise: <ul> <li>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.</li> <li>5+ years of managing managers, with a track record of developing high-performing, distributed teams, and steering them toward a shared strategy and standard.</li> <li>Hands-on experience owning talent decisions, including hiring, performance management, calibration, and succession planning.</li> <li>Experience in customer support, contact center operations, or a similar global service organization is a plus.</li> <li>Advanced degree in a relevant discipline (Computer Science, Information Science, Technical Writing, or similar) — or equivalent practical experience.</li> <li>Deep expertise in content strategy, knowledge management, and information architecture, with a demonstrated understanding of AI/ML applications in content operations.</li> <li>Expert knowledge of content management systems and authoring tooling; practical experience with AI-powered content optimization.</li> <li>Comfortable partnering directly with engineers on system architecture, data structures, and retrieval mechanics — deep technical fluency is essential.</li> <li>Collaborative, solution-oriented, and able to execute at scale across genuinely distinct disciplines.</li> <li>Highly developed executive presence, with the ability to build and present business cases to VP/C-level stakeholders.</li> <li>Proven ability to steer and shape the work of multiple related teams and their leaders, removing ambiguity for executing parties and raising the capability of an already-strong team.</li> <li>A proven people leader who hires, develops, and retains senior talent, coaches leaders through growth and difficult conversations, and builds an inclusive team where people feel they belong.</li> <li>Skilled at joining an established team and leading it through change: earns trust quickly, respects existing expertise, and aligns leaders around shared goals.</li> </ul> Your Location: Due to the nature of this position, the successful applicant will need to be based in the State of California, the State of Washington, or the State of Oregon to be able to conduct their work. 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: <a style="color: #000000;" href="mailto:reasonableaccommodations@airbnb.com">reasonableaccommodations@airbnb.com</a>. 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. Equal Employment Opportunity: Airbnb values diversity & belonging and is proud to be an Equal Employment Opportunity employer. All individuals seeking employment at Airbnb are considered without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, age, gender, sex, marital status, ancestry, physical or mental disability, veteran status, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, or any other legally protected characteristic. <div class="content-pay-transparency"><div class="pay-input"><div class="description">How We'll Take Care of You: Our job titles may span more than one career level. The actual base pay is dependent upon many factors, such as: training, transferable skills, work experience, business needs and market demands. The base pay range is subject to change and may be modified in the future. This role may also be eligible for bonus, equity, benefits, and Employee Travel Credits.  </div><div class="title">Pay Range</div><div class="pay-range">$196,000—$245,000 USD</div></div></div><div class="content-conclusion">  Reasonable Accommodations: We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations throughout the recruitment process for applicants with disabilities. If you need assistance, or an accommodation, please let your recruiter know once you are contacted about a role. A Note on Recruiting Scams: Scammers sometimes pose as Airbnb recruiters to get money or personal information from candidates. A few things that will always be true for Airbnb’s hiring process: our open roles are posted on Airbnb’s Career’s Page at careers.airbnb.com, and our recruiters correspond only from @<a href="http://airbnb.com">airbnb.com</a> or @<a href="http://ext.airbnb.com">ext.airbnb.com</a> email addresses. Our recruiters will never ask for your Social Security number, bank account details, passport, or payment app information while you are interviewing.  We’ll also never ask you to pay a fee, send money, deposit or cash a check, or purchase work-related equipment (such as a company laptop) during the interview process. We encourage candidates to remain vigilant of these recruiting scams and not share sensitive information if you do not believe an individual is actually affiliated with Airbnb.  </div>

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