Staff Experience Designer, Tooling

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:

You will partner with supporting disciplines such as writers, researchers, product specialists, and engineers to build beautiful, usable, forward-looking products that empower our customers and agents to find elegant solutions to complex challenges. Our design charter is to help foster an emotional connection with our community, keeping usability and accessibility as our prime virtues. We do our best to practice inclusive design at every turn, spanning both the online and offline experiences we create for our community.

The Difference You Will Make:

Design for customer support is a calling. We’re there to ensure every guest’s dream trip goes off without a snag. We’re there to build confidence in every new host as they publish their first listing. And when things don’t go smoothly, we’re the ones to support our customers and agents on the path to making it right. We believe agents deserve world class, AI-driven tools that enable them to quickly get to the root of issues, resolve with a fast, full and fair approach, and serve as genuine ambassadors of our brand. You will design for a wide variety of tooling experiences to support our current products and future opportunities.

What skills are crucial?

Strong craft is a must — with a strong foundation in interaction and visual design, you understand what it takes to digest a complex problem and create simple, usable, and scalable solutions. At Airbnb we believe agents deserve the same quality design as our customers.

Audacious pragmatism is a must — you are experienced at developing compelling visions that solve user needs and business problems, and persuading a wide audience of cross-functional stakeholders to adopt this vision, and understand how to light the runway from the current state to the future state. 

Curious tinkering is a must — you are capable of quickly onboarding to a highly technical domain, including applying new technologies, like generative AI, to up-level product experiences and test your hypothesis. 

Systems thinking is a must — your designs live in super complex environments, designing for both on and offline moments when traveling and hosting, and understanding how design flexes to meet fraught end to end journeys is crucial.

Radical collaboration is a must — you partner with cross-functional partners across Trust, Customer Support, and Payments, you will shape the vision and strategy for this complex domain area — and work with other designers, writers, and researchers to design simple, intuitive, and scalable agent tools that keep our community safe. 

The Staff Experience Designer is an individual contributor (IC) role that will report to a Manager or Senior Manager of Experience Design. 

A Typical Day: 

• Drive a holistic vision and strategy for agent tooling in close partnership with senior leaders across Product, Engineering, Operations, Research, and UX Writing. 
• Lead multiple initiatives from inception to launch, including overseeing the quality of other designers’ work in a fast-paced and ambiguous environment.
• Deliver high-quality and creative designs that both satisfy technical and operational requirements and meet Airbnb Design’s high standards. Advocate for holistic solutions that can scale to support future roadmap needs and features.
• Create system maps, user flows, prototypes, and page-level specs to communicate design decisions to a variety of stakeholders. 
• Actively contribute to our design language system and drive consistency of design patterns across tooling.
• Meet with cross-functional team members based around the world. While Airbnb has a Live and Work Anywhere policy, you’ll need to meet with cross-functional partners based in Beijing at least once a week outside of regular business hours (5-7 PM PST).

Your Expertise:

• 10+ years of hands-on product design experience, and 2+ years experience leading projects and/or initiatives.
• Domain experience designing for complex domain areas, such as multi-sided marketplaces. Past experience in tooling is appreciated, but not required.
• Proficiency across UX thinking and systems design, interaction design, visual design, and prototyping. 
• Track record of designing and shipping high-quality products and user experiences across multiple platf