The Road to Airbnb — Anna Sulkina's Journey

Anna Sulkina grew up in eastern Ukraine immersed in technology. She lived through the turbulent period of the Soviet Union's collapse, but seeing her first computer assembled from parts her brother brought home, she was captivated by "the process of parts coming together to form a single system," and from then on nurtured a dream of working with computers.

After learning programming at a university in Ukraine, when she moved to the United States, English proved to be a bigger barrier than coding. She adapted by taking ESL classes at a community college and learning C++ and, at the time new, Java at Berkeley Extension. At her first job, she couldn't finish the written exam in time because of the language barrier, but she was given another chance and passed. Afterward, the center of her career shifted from C++ to Java, and she recalls that for a while, Russian felt like her native language, Java her second language, and English her third.

Her career began in hardware diagnostics and moved down through frontend, backend, and deeper into infrastructure. Along the way, her responsibilities grew as well; at first, a leadership role didn't come naturally, but after several offers, coaching teams and driving results became increasingly interesting and enjoyable. Passing through Caymas Systems and Comcast, she transitioned from IC to engineering manager, and by directly seeing the difference between teams with good leaders and those without, she learned the value of leadership.

One of the biggest turning points was her nearly 9 years at Twitter. Starting as a first-line manager, she grew into senior manager and director through the fail whale era and major events like Ellen DeGeneres's "selfie that broke Twitter." The key lessons from this period were twofold:

• Technically, large-scale distributed systems must be designed assuming failure rather than avoiding it
• Culturally, for a new idea to spread across an organization, technical excellence alone isn't enough — consensus-building and organizational support are also required

As Twitter's stack transitioned from a monolith to microservices, she gained firsthand experience with the realities of incident response while working on more robust, high-scale, low-latency distributed systems. She also contributed to bootstrapping a team based on work that started at a hackathon to build Twitter's GraphQL API — replacing legacy REST services — even though GraphQL was an unproven idea early on. This choice required persuading many teams and stakeholders, but ultimately it significantly boosted the velocity of product feature teams.

When she received an offer from Airbnb in 2022, she felt it was time to prepare for her next journey. As someone who had long been both an Airbnb user and a lover of travel, she judged it to be a company where her personal interests and technical interests fully overlapped for the first time. In particular, she saw a familiar yet significant challenge in the Developer Platform organization, which needed to untangle siloed work, establish a clear strategy and direction, and build trust with other engineers.

After joining, she first focused on reorganizing the organization and coaching leadership, pursuing both internal and external alignment simultaneously. After redefining basic questions like "why do we work together" and "where are we going," she built DevX surveys herself to measure user satisfaction. As a result, within 1-2 years the team established itself as a high-performing organization, improving developer experience and productivity while also earning the trust of engineers. During that period, developer satisfaction rose by about 10% annually on average.

Currently, as Senior Director of Engineering, she leads Application & Cloud Infrastructure. Her scope includes compute, networking, core services, and the GraphQL application platform. Engineers don't work with AWS directly but use the necessary infrastructure through an abstracted platform, and her organization also provides common services such as authorization, authentication, and configuration management.

She says that the pace of growth accelerates when the joy of solving new problems, great colleagues, and the ability to work from anywhere all come together. She compares her entire life to long-distance trail running, emphasizing the importance of preparation before starting, long-term pacing, recovery, strategy, discipline, and the people who run alongside you. For her, Airbnb — like a midpoint between a startup and a large company, where systems and workflows are mature but there are still many interesting problems to solve — has become the right next destination.