Luck Favors the Prepared: My Journey Across Three Roles at Airbnb

Career growth doesn’t always mean switching companies — sometimes, the best opportunities are right where you are.

Introduction

I joined Airbnb in early 2016 and recently celebrated my ninth anniversary at the company. Many, including myself, are surprised by how long I’ve stayed with a single company. In Silicon Valley, where the average employee tenure is usually no more than four years, nine years at one company feels like an eternity.

When people ask why I’ve stayed so long, I often explain that rather than sticking to the same job for nine years, I’ve explored three different roles across distinct functions. Over the years, several colleagues have reached out for advice on navigating similar transitions, since I’ve successfully made this shift not once, but twice.

While luck certainly played a big role, in this post, I would like to share a few things that I did that increases my odds of expanding my skill sets and career paths.

My Path

I started at Airbnb as a data scientist in early 2016, focusing on growing Airbnb’s supply. Over the years, I contributed to key projects and was always fascinated by some of the internal tools we built at Airbnb. From 2017 to 2019, Airbnb’s Data Science team faced a challenging time. We no longer had a dedicated Data Engineering team, which meant data scientists, including myself, had to take on engineering responsibilities. While some found this shift frustrating, I was passionate about the field and embraced the opportunity to learn as much as I could.

In 2019, Airbnb revamped its data strategy, and an opening to lead the Metric Infrastructure team came up. Despite my lack of formal product management experience, the hiring manager took a chance on me. From 2019 to 2021, I worked with a fantastic team of engineers to scale Minerva, Airbnb’s metrics platform, from a handful of use cases to a core component of the company’s data quality initiatives. Minerva transformed how analytics is done at Airbnb and remains the primary tool for creating trustworthy datasets.

By 2021, Minerva had become highly successful, but some of its early technical decisions were showing limitations. We decided to rebuild Minerva from the ground up to serve users for the long term. Seeing this as an exciting opportunity, I transitioned into engineering, with support from my engineering partner and my director. Since then, I’ve been a software engineer on the same team I once managed as a PM. By early 2025, we successfully migrated the entire stack to a new, more powerful system.

How to Improve Your Odds

While my path might seem straightforward, each transition involved strategic exploration, seeking sponsorship, and advocating for myself. While luck plays a huge role, it’s something beyond our control. Instead, I want to focus on the actions you can take before formally considering a transition.

Do Good Work

This should be obvious: if you can’t excel in your current role, it’s hard to convince others that you’re ready for more responsibility or something new. On the other hand, showing excellence makes it easier for others to envision you succeeding in different areas.

When Airbnb’s Data Science team needed to build critical data pipelines, I became one of the lead contributors on the Host team. I collaborated closely with data platform partners, learning a lot from them. I was also frequently on call for data issues and proactively proposed new ways to improve reliability and enhance our data tools. By taking ownership and rapidly improving my data engineering skills, I stood out during this time.

As Charlie Munger once said:

“To get what you want, you have to deserve what you want.

Establish a Good Reputation

Around the same time, I worked closely with the Data Platform team, particularly the Machine Learning Infrastructure group. As an early adopter of Zipline, our feature store, I faced numerous usability issues. Rather than getting frustrated, I turned these into constructive feedback and detailed documentation to improve the developer experience.

Witnessing the power of these new tools firsthand, I proactively advocated for them on behalf of the platform team and encouraged my fellow data scientists to give them a try. I partnered with individual users, led brown bag sessions, and conducted training workshops—each crucial to driving the adoption of these tools.

These efforts helped me build trust with my Data Platform peers, earning a reputation as someone who understood user workflows and could translate pain points into actionable requirements. I also became known as a natural developer advocate who could evangelize impartially. Little did I know, these would be key traits for a Product Manager.

Identify Adjacent Opportunities

While the transition from Data Science to Product Management might seem like a huge shift, it felt more like a natural progression for me. The role involved leading an internal product in the data space, rather than a highly visible product like the Airbnb app.

Given my background, I had deep empathy for how users might want to use the tools. Plus, my proven ability to collaborate with Data Platform engineers as an early adopter of Zipline was a huge asset. The hiring manager valued this experience to offset my lack of formal PM experience.

Similarly, when transitioning from PM to Engineering, I didn’t switch to a completely different domain. I focused on honing my engineering skills within the same team, which minimized context switching. This decision allowed me to focus my cognitive energy on learning engineering without the added complexity of learning an entirely new domain.

Identifying adjacent opportunities is, to me, a crucial aspect of successfully switching roles. Just as I advocate for learning adjacent skills, I believe the best way to achieve that is by pursuing adjacent opportunities.

Finding Sponsorship

No matter how qualified you are or how much desire you have to try new roles, you’ll need a sponsor—someone who is willing to bet on you. The best approach isn’t to ask for opportunities but to create and propose them. Clearly articulate why being in those roles will help address the sponsor’s challenges.

In fact, I didn’t initially consider the PM opportunity. It was the PM who asked if I knew anyone in my network who would be a good fit. After receiving some guidance on the ideal candidate the hiring manager was looking for, I reached out to a few people, only to realize later that I might be uniquely qualified for the role myself. I engaged with the hiring manager, and we went through several rounds of discussions. It wasn’t until after a few conversations that we both felt comfortable and confident that this would be a safe bet for both of us.

For my transition to engineering, my sponsor was the senior staff engineer who leads the overall team effort. I shared with him my long history and interest in building great data tools and explained what basic engineering skills I had (and those I still lacked). After reviewing some of my earlier work as a data scientist, he believed there was a good chance I could excel in the role and decided to advocate for me in front of our director. The director trusted the senior staff engineer’s judgment, and that’s how I began my engineering trial, which I eventually completed successfully.

Conclusion

Looking back on my time at Airbnb, I’ve realized that career transitions aren’t just about jumping into a new role. They’re about positioning yourself for new opportunities, embracing challenges, and continuously learning. Each transition I made was about taking the next step thoughtfully and strategically, building on what I already knew, and finding new areas to grow. Just as Fortune favors the prepared mind, luck favors the prepared.

Doing great work in your current role is key to proving you’re ready for more. Building a strong reputation for reliability and adaptability helps others see your potential to succeed in new roles. Focusing on adjacent opportunities, where you can leverage existing skills while learning new ones, makes transitions smoother. And remember, having a sponsor—someone who believes in you—is essential to opening doors.