Ian Christian Myers

Currently

Airbnb

Sr. Engineering Manager, Client & Service Platforms 2019 – Today

I lead a ~35-person organization of 4 platform teams—Android, iOS, Java, and Web—responsible for developer experience and productivity tooling used by 2,500+ engineers:

• Developed the Client & Service Platform teams' technical strategy centered on reducing developer cognitive load. Drove platform simplification initiatives across all platforms, resulting in developer experience CSAT improvements: Android (78%→98%), iOS (86%→95%), Web (76%→91%), JVM (69%→82%).
• Initiated and led 5-year Ruby service deprecation strategy: drove decision to halt new Ruby service creation, established deprecation timeline, designed and led the program execution—resulting in decommissioning of ~100 Ruby services and eliminating Ruby (almost) entirely from Airbnb's production stack.
• Proposed and drove consolidation of fragmented build systems onto Bazel with shared infrastructure across Web, iOS, Java, Go, and Python—iOS build times reduced 46% (P50), Web CI 29-42% faster; Backend builds 2-3x faster with 72% flake rate reduction.
• Developed strategy to accelerate tech debt reduction while minimizing developer burden through AI-assisted migration automation; initial proof-of-concept migrated 10,000 Enzyme tests to React Testing Library in 6 weeks with zero product engineer effort, then scaled infrastructure org-wide, saving 10+ engineer-years of effort with migrations 3-10x faster.
• Developed engineering managers through full career arcs—one direct report grew from Senior IC to Senior EM over 7 years (12-person team → 25-person org with 2 EMs), now operating as a peer. Established a track record of building leadership bench that gets promoted into expanded roles.

Engineering Manager, Web Platform & Accessibility 2016 – 2019

Managed 15 engineers across Web Platform and Accessibility teams:

• Team led the migration of Airbnb's entire web frontend (~5M lines of code) out of a monolithic Rails application to a new Node.js-based architecture.
• Established early migration automation practices using codemods that later evolved into org-wide AI-assisted migration strategy.
• Team led Airbnb's adoption of TypeScript, taking codebase from 0% to 100% adoption over 3 years, during which we built and open-sourced ts-migrate.
• Team open-sourced Enzyme, which became a widely-adopted React testing library.

Senior Software Engineer & Tech Lead, Web Platform 2014 – 2016

Tech Lead for Web Platform. Drove consolidation from 4 competing frontend frameworks (Rails/ERB, Backbone, Flight.js, React) onto React as the standard for new feature development. Led web performance initiatives including server-side rendering and code splitting.

Previously

Findery

Senior Software Engineer 2012 – 2014

Built the public API and scaled infrastructure for launch.

Zappos

Senior Software Engineer 2009 – 2012

Led various product experiments on the Zappos Labs team.

Software Engineer 2008 – 2009

Led frontend architecture for Zappos site redesign, built the Zappos Map.

Education

University of California, Santa Cruz

BA, Politics Class of 2008

While studying Politics at UCSC I made time for a handful of Computer Science and Computer Engineering courses. I was a Research Assistant in the Computer Science department and guest lectured for a course called From Software Innovation to Social Enterpreneurship.