Sumbry

Sumbry currently leads Reliability Engineering @ Airbnb. His team is responsible for the overall reliability of the Airbnb Platform: building tools, automation, ensuring product quality, and providing production engineering expertise to all of Airbnb. Sumbry has almost two decades of experience working in the platform, infrastructure, and reliability engineering space but comes from a non-traditional background: having started his career as a software engineer, Sumbry pivoted to network engineering because he wanted to learn more about the core technology that enabled the Internet and other distributed systems.

Sumbry joined several startups as the Internet grew in popularity and quickly learned how to build and scale infrastructure, striving to strike the right balance between perfection and growth. Sumbry eventually started several of his own businesses because he thought he had some good ideas (and also wanted to learn more about problem-solving from a product and customer perspective). Some great (and expensive) lessons were learned here are a big reason why Sumbry is heavily customer focused today even from the infrastructure and reliability side of development. Sumbry is also an Electronic Music DJ and producer in his free time, as getting away from platforms and infrastructure actually helps preserve his sanity.