This article provides a roadmap for career growth from IC to senior leadership while highlighting technical transitions from monoliths to microservices. It emphasizes the importance of designing for failure in distributed systems and the cultural impact of infrastructure on developer velocity.
Anna Sulkina has always been a traveler, and we’re lucky her travels have brought her to Airbnb. Anna is a Senior Director of Engineering, and she’s responsible for Application & Cloud infrastructure. She brings over two decades of industry experience to Airbnb, including work spanning the stack from the frontend to the backend to the plumbing that makes everything come together. Anna is a mother, a passionate trail runner, and an accomplished leader. Here’s Anna’s story in her own words.
I grew up in Eastern Ukraine, and the year I was graduating from high school, the Soviet Union collapsed. Despite the political turmoil, it was an interesting time to get into technology, and I have my brother to thank for that.
I was always a nerdy kid, at school and at home, and my older brother really stoked that curiosity. He was studying computer hardware in Moscow, and he’d bring home computer parts to play with. I still remember the first computer he’d assembled, which required a cassette player to load programs. Only after many minutes of buzzing and clicking would the computer finally whirr to life.
Thinking back, that was really my first inspiration to work in technology. Seeing the inner workings of this new thing, a computer, and watching how the parts came together to form a whole — that’s what made me realize I wanted to work with computers, too.
Of course, I didn’t know the Soviet Union would end, which made studying in Moscow impossible. But technology was still my future.
I got my start learning programming in a local Ukrainian university, and after four years of studying, I immigrated to America.
When I arrived, I knew how to program, and I knew how to write and read English, but I couldn’t communicate well. I took ESL classes at a community college and, in parallel, enrolled in Berkeley Extension classes to advance my C++ knowledge and learn Java, which was still very new at the time.
Throughout my first couple of jobs, I was more likely to run into challenges with the English language rather than with programming languages.
My first job was in computer hardware diagnostics at a tiny company with only five engineers, where we communicated directly with hardware manufacturers. This was right before the dot-com bubble burst.
I almost didn’t get the job, though. The interview process for this job included a written portion that tested my knowledge of key computer science terms before getting to solve the coding problems. Given my prior education, I knew all the terms, but I ran out of time because the language gap slowed me down. Luckily, my interviewer happened to be taking the same Java class at Berkeley, and when I explained what happened, he gave me the chance to come back. I finished the test, got the job, and the rest is history.
In subsequent jobs, I transitioned fully from C++ to Java, which became my primary programming language for many years. I eventually got the hang of speaking English more confidently, but for a while, it still felt like Russian was my first language, Java was my second, and English was only my third.
At various times, my career often felt all over the place. But looking back, I see a trajectory I wasn’t aware of at the time. I started with a brief stint in hardware diagnostics, but after that, I worked in the frontend and, over time, descended the software stack from frontend to backend to the deeper infrastructure I work with today.
Parallel to this trajectory down the stack was an upward trajectory in responsibility. Leadership wasn’t an obvious path for me at first — I had to be pitched multiple times — but the more I tried it, the more interesting and enjoyable it felt.
When I worked at Caymas Systems, a telecom startup, my manager was quick to recognize my leadership potential. He was really encouraging, but even more encouraging was witnessing the difference between teams with good leaders and those without.
After Caymas Systems, I worked at Comcast, where I eventually switched from an IC to an engineering manager. Once I experienced the joys of coaching people, building cool software together, and developing high-performing teams, I knew this was the path I wanted to take.
This path took me through a formative time in my career: the almost nine years I spent working at Twitter. I began as a first-line manager and, over time, worked through some of Twitter’s biggest events, including the “fail whale” era and the Ellen DeGeneres “selfie that broke Twitter” moment.
This was an exciting time. I was working at the heart of Twitter’s tech stack, supporting teams that powered its consumer and revenue verticals. This is where I grew into a senior manager and, eventually, a director. Looking back over nearly a decade of work, two major lessons stand out: one technical and one cultural.
The technical lesson was about failure — namely, its inevitability.
Over my tenure, the Twitter stack transitioned from a monolith to a microservices architecture. This resulted in a set of robust, high-scale, low-latency distributed systems, and it was here that I learned that, when building resilient distributed systems, you need to design for failure, not hope to avoid it.
I often think back to How Complex Systems Fail — the more complex a system, the more likely it is to fail. I remembered that lesson every time we were called to the Twitter command center to deal with an incident; it was all hands on deck until everything was back online.
The cultural lesson was about adoption and what it takes to fuel great ideas.
Today, almost two-thirds of enterprises use GraphQL in production, but in its early days, it was a new, largely untested idea. During a hack week, a couple of engineers laid the groundwork for using this technology at Twitter. I worked closely with them and bootstrapped the team that eventually built Twitter’s GraphQL API, replacing the legacy REST services.
I still think about this experience today. It required convincing leadership and building consensus across numerous teams and stakeholders, but once we did, the payoff was significant: this one technical choice accelerated the velocity of product feature teams across the company.
When Airbnb reached out in 2022, I realized my time at Twitter was coming to a close. By that point, my organization was well-run and high-performing — a success, but also a sign that I was ready for my next adventure.
Airbnb immediately stood out because the company offered, for the first time in my career, a true alignment between my personal and technical interests. I love traveling, and I have been a long-time Airbnb guest since 2013. I had always wanted to work for a company that built a product I truly cared about, and this was my chance.
I only got more excited when I learned about the people and teams I’d be working with. The Developer Platform organization, which was responsible for supporting all of Airbnb’s engineers, faced challenges I’d seen before. There was a lot of good work happening in silos, and folks were longing for a clear strategy and direction. Also, I saw an opportunity to not only improve developer experience but also build trust with the rest of the engineers and stakeholders.
So, I started at the beginning. We focused on setting up the organization, coaching leadership, and building internal alignment within the team, as well as external alignment across all the teams we supported. Fundamental questions like “Why are we here together?” and “Where are we going?” all had to be answered.
After a year or two of this work, we had a high-performing team with a clear strategy and strong execution, consistently delivering business value and improving the developer experience and productivity at Airbnb. Even more importantly, we earned the rest of the engineers’ trust, and we enabled our technical teams to perform better.
We saw this reflected in the bi-annual DevX surveys (which we built out), and the results showed overall developer satisfaction increasing about 10% year over year during my time on the team.
Today, I’m Senior Director of Engineering for Application & Cloud Infrastructure, which includes compute, networking, core services, and the GraphQL application platform. Our mission is to deliver reliable, secure, and efficient platforms for building, operating, and scaling applications, services, and workloads at Airbnb.
My primary users are still the engineers at Airbnb. When they need to compute, they don’t wrangle AWS themselves — we provide a layer of abstraction that helps them use low-level infrastructure. Similarly, if they need authorization, authentication, configuration management, and a host of other services, they come to us rather than starting from scratch.
I’m excited to come to work every day because of the people I get to work with and the opportunities we face together. The culture is excellent, the people are smart and collaborative, and the engineers we support appreciate the work we do.
The setup is empowering, too, and as you solve problems, you can grow and expand to tackle bigger problems that span teams and organizations. Add in the ability to work from anywhere, and for me, it feels like the sky is the limit.
As I look back on my career, and really, my entire life, I tend to see it now through the lens of long-distance trail running — a major hobby of mine.
After working at a startup, having twins, and running my first marathon, I felt like I could do anything. At work and on the trails, I think about how to prepare for the journeys ahead and how to maintain a pace that allows me and the people around me to thrive in the long run. Recovery is necessary, but so is strategy, drive, discipline, and finding the people who will go with you as well as cheer you on along the way.
I’m happy this path, as unpredictable as it has been, has taken me to Airbnb. Airbnb is in that ideal position between a startup and a long-established company. The systems and workflows are mature, but there are still many interesting problems to solve and opportunities to pursue. If that’s of interest to you, I encourage you to check out openings at Airbnb.
My Journey to Airbnb — Anna Sulkina was originally published in The Airbnb Tech Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
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