Global marketplace for stays and experiences. The canonical design-led company.
Airbnb is THE design-led tech company. Co-founder Brian Chesky is a trained industrial designer from RISD, and design thinking has driven every major company decision. Trust between strangers sharing homes is fundamentally a design problem. Airbnb pioneered the "Snow White" storyboarding process (borrowed from Pixar), created one of the first major design systems (DLS), and popularized the "11-star experience" framework.
Design Leadership
Sergio Vilatimo
Creative Director
Elisabeth Schwarz
Head of Design Operations
Lin Gao
Interaction Designer
Ben Christie
Senior Design Manager
Teo Connor
VP of Design
Alex Schleifer
Former CDO
Sara Steinberg
Creative Director
Ayan Daniels Urbańska
Design Lead
Bek Stone
Director of Design at
Cat Nygaard
Design Director
Andrea P.
Staff Product Designer
10 open design roles
United States (Remote)
Staff-level experience design at Airbnb — one of the most iconic design organizations in tech. A staff role here means shaping the travel experience for hundreds of millions of people.
Airbnb has long set the bar for product craft, and a staff-level UX writer shaping the international experience gets to define voice across dozens of markets. Words-as-design work at this scale is rare. A great fit for content designers who think in systems, not just strings.
San Francisco, CA
A rare offline design role at one of the most design-celebrated companies in tech. Airbnb's investment in physical experiences signals serious commitment to holistic design thinking. This is the kind of role where a designer's work shows up in the real world, not just on screens.
United States
Service design at Airbnb has always sat at the unusual intersection of digital product, host operations, and physical guest experience. A staff service designer here gets to shape the end-to-end systems behind a brand whose product lives partly online and partly in 100,000 living rooms.
Airbnb helped write the modern playbook for brand-led design, and a senior creative director steering social and content shapes how that voice shows up where culture actually happens. A high-visibility seat for someone who can balance real craft with the pace of social.
San Francisco, CA
Airbnb remains one of the most design-revered companies in tech, and an Offline Design seat is unusual: it stretches beyond screens into physical, experiential design. For anyone interested in how a product brand shows up in the real world, this is rare territory at a company that takes craft seriously.
San Francisco, CA
Airbnb's words have always been part of its design — warm, specific, never corporate. Leading UX writing here means owning that voice across a product used in hundreds of countries, on a design team that still treats copy as a first-class craft rather than a finishing layer.
Airbnb's brand is one of the most admired in tech, and this role leads real-time, reactive social creative — the fast, culture-aware work that keeps the brand feeling alive. It leans marketing-creative rather than product, but the visibility is enormous.
United States
Airbnb treats design as a first-class discipline, and this role sits at the production end of that machine, turning brand and creative ambition into shipped work. It leans more toward orchestration than hands-on pixels, but the craft bar at Airbnb is famously high. A strong seat for a creative lead who likes operating at scale.
United States
Belonging has been one of Airbnb's defining design problems for nearly a decade — surfaced in flows, in policy, in trust signals. A solutions designer in this remit turns a values document into actual product behavior, with full visibility from the design org.
Design team · 18 people
Sergio Vilatimo
Lead · Creative Director
Elisabeth Schwarz
Lead · Head of Design Operations
Lin Gao
Lead · Interaction Designer
Ben Christie
Lead · Senior Design Manager
Teo Connor
Lead · VP of Design
Alex Schleifer
Lead · Former CDO
Sara Steinberg
Lead · Creative Director
Ayan Daniels Urbańska
Lead · Design Lead
Bek Stone
Lead · Director of Design at
Cat Nygaard
Lead · Design Director
Andrea P.
Lead · Staff Product Designer
Charlie Aufmann
Design Lead
Janum Trivedi
Prototyping & Design
Karina Sirqueira
Design Director
Kathryn Gonzalez
Design Engineer
Shilpi Tomar
Content Designer
Kendra Ralston
content designer
Kevin Tenglin
visual designer
Who to reach out to
Design recruiters at Airbnb