Scaling New Heights EP #8 - Making a Difference at Airbnb, the Story of a Reliability Engineer

Welcome to The New Stack Makers: Scaling New Heights, a series of interviews, conducted by Scalyr CEO Christine Heckart, that cover the challenges engineering managers have faced when scaling architectures to support the demands of the business.

Uber. Recall the company in 2017, the management, the scale, and the post by Susan Fowler, who detailed experiences that speak to the hopes and terrible realities at the company. That’s the scenario that faced Donald Sumbry, who now heads reliability engineering at Airbnb in this interview with Heckart. He was not aware of the issues internally at Uber due, he says, to the work and all the technical problems that needed resolving.

"In early 2017, we had the Susan Fowler blog post, and one of the things I remember the most was that some of what was what had happened was actually a surprise to me," Sumbry said, "And I realized that I was so knee-deep in the work that I was doing, that there were so many problems to solve. And we attracted the type of people that just jumped into a problem.

Joining Airbnb, Sumbry brought what he learned at Uber about looking at the big picture. He also learned to avoid the savior complex. Every company is different, no matter how much it may seem that the engineer has seen it all and can solve all the problems.