airbnb
Senior Business Operations Lead
Is this role open to you?
London
Confirm work authorization, visa sponsorship and location requirements with the employer.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
The Chief Business Officer organization drives company-wide growth and global expansion.
This is the role that turns Airbnb's ambition for the UKI & Nordics into a plan and holds the organisation to delivering it: shaping strategy, aligning cross-functional teams, and driving sustainable commercial growth across one of our most important regions.
This includes recruiting and supporting high-quality Stays, Experiences, and Services, alongside executing Airbnb’s global market strategy. Shaping business approaches, quality supply sourcing, and international growth efforts are integral to the team’s success in connecting millions more hosts and guests to Airbnb's platform.
The Difference You Will Make
You will join the UKI, Nordics, Middle East and Africa team, covering one of Airbnb’s largest and most mature markets alongside five of Europe’s most digitally advanced, high-trust travel markets. The UK offers scale, brand strength, and a sophisticated regulatory environment; the Nordics offer strong domestic travel behaviour and significant headroom for growth. Together they make this one of the most commercially interesting regions in EMEA to build in.
A Typical Day
You will own the business operations agenda for the UKI and Nordics. Airbnb’s most established European market alongside five high-potential Nordic markets (Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland). Partnering closely with the Country Manager, you will set the regional growth strategy, translate it into a plan cross-functional teams can execute against, and run the operating rhythm that keeps it on track. This is a high-visibility role: your influence will come from the quality of your thinking and your ability to mobilise teams to grow further.
Regional growth strategy
- Own the UKI & Nordics growth strategy end to end: define where the region should compete, what it should stop doing, and the handful of bets that will move guest nights, supply growth, and revenue.
- Build the annual and quarterly plan with the Country Manager, sizing opportunities and making explicit recommendations on where to deploy marketing spend, supply investment, and partnership effort.
- Set and pressure-test the region’s targets, translating global goals into market-level commitments that supply, marketing, partnerships, policy, and product teams can own.
- Run deep-dive analyses on demand and supply dynamics, competitive movements, pricing, and seasonality, turning each into a clear recommendation, not just a read-out.
- Identify and stand up new growth initiatives, using the UK as a test market for offerings that can then scale across EMEA, and the Nordics as a proving ground for high-penetration, low-friction market plays.
- Build the case for investment in the region: sizing, business case, and the socialisation needed to win resource in global planning cycles.
Operating rhythm and execution
- Own the region’s operating cadence: weekly, monthly, and quarterly business reviews, so leadership has a single, trusted view of performance and the story behind it.
- Convert strategy into sequenced execution plans with named owners, milestones, and success measures across supply, marketing, partnerships, policy, and product.
- Track delivery against the plan, surfacing risks and bottlenecks early and driving them to resolution rather than escalating them.
- Design and continuously improve the operating processes the region runs on, raising the bar on efficiency, transparency, and decision speed.
- Lead the region’s input into global planning and resource allocation cycles.
Cross-functional leadership
- Act as the connective tissue between the UKI & Nordics team and global functions such as Product, Marketing, Communications, Policy, Finance, Data Science, Legal, and Community Support.
- Be the go-to decision partner alongside the Country Manager: the person other teams come to for the region’s position, context, and priorities.
- Build alignment on high-priority projects, market launches, and product tests, brokering trade-offs between global consistency and local market reality.
- Represent UKI & Nordics in NEMEA and global business operations forums, and bring the best of what other markets are doing back into the region.
- Partner with Public Policy on the regulatory landscape, including short-term let rules in the UKI and Nordic city regulation so commercial plans account for policy risk and opportunity.
Insights and storytelling
- Turn complex data into clear narratives that help leadership decide with a recommendation attached.
- Build the reporting layer the region relies on: dashboards, performance packs, and executive materials, working with a dedicated analyst.
- Establish the metrics that matter for the region and hold the team to a shared definition of success.
- Champion data-driven decision-making, and use AI tooling to compress the time from question to insight. Automating recurring analysis and reporting so the team spends its time on judgement, not assembly.
Your Expertise
To deliver in this role, Airbnb is seeking candidates with:
- 12+ years in business operations, strategy, consulting, or commercial leadership, with a track record of owning outcomes in a market or business unit
- Demonstrated ability to set strategy and drive it through to execution
- Deep experience influencing without authority across a global matrixed organisation
- Strong analytical toolkit; comfortable working with finance and data science partners and interrogating the numbers yourself
- Exceptional written and verbal communication, with executive presence in front of senior leadership
- Comfort with ambiguity, and a strong bias toward action and ownership
- Practical fluency with AI tools and a view on where they change how a team operates
- Familiarity with the UKI and/or Nordic markets, or comparable mature-market experience
Additional
- Experience in a two-sided marketplace, travel/hospitality, or consumer tech
- Experience launching or scaling new products or lines of business in-market
- This role will require to be in the London office 3 days per week.
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.
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 shown below is annualized, 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.
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 @airbnb.com or @ext.airbnb.com 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.
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