My Journey to Airbnb — Anna Sulkina

Anna Sulkina, Senior Director of Engineering at Airbnb, shares her career journey from Soviet-era Ukraine to leading Application & Cloud Infrastructure.

• •Immigrated from Ukraine to the US after the Soviet Union's collapse, learning C++ and Java at Berkeley while overcoming English language barriers early in her career
• •Career progressed down the software stack from hardware diagnostics to frontend, backend, and deep infrastructure, with parallel growth into engineering leadership
• •Spent nearly nine years at Twitter, leading teams through the monolith-to-microservices transition and bootstrapping the GraphQL API that replaced legacy REST services
• •Joined Airbnb in 2022 to lead the Developer Platform org, building team alignment and improving developer satisfaction by ~10% year over year via DevX surveys
• •Now oversees compute, networking, core services, and the GraphQL application platform, providing infrastructure abstractions for Airbnb's engineering teams