How We Enable Airbnb Team Members To Code Like A Mobile Engineer
Article Summary
Jaclyn Karnowski from Airbnb reveals how they transformed 45 engineers into mobile developers in just 14 days. The confidence shift? 15% to 90% ready to ship production code.
With 83% of daily active hosts on mobile and only 100 mobile engineers, Airbnb faced a scaling crisis. Their TechEd team designed 'Code Like a Mobile Engineer,' a peer-to-peer learning program that turns backend and web engineers into native iOS and Android contributors through intensive, project-based training.
Key Takeaways
- 14-day intensive program: 5 days platform fundamentals, 9 days Airbnb-specific frameworks
- 45 engineers completed, merging 180+ PRs to mobile codebase across cohorts
- One-third of mobile engineers mentor through code reviews and office hours
- Engineers build real apps using Airbnb's open-source projects and internal tools
- Confidence to ship mobile code jumped from 15% to 90% in two weeks
Airbnb scaled mobile engineering capacity by upskilling existing engineers through a structured 14-day program, achieving 90% confidence in production readiness and 180+ merged PRs.
About This Article
Airbnb's mobile engineering team had about 100 native engineers supporting their main platform. They were struggling to keep up with feature requests and product work, and a backlog kept growing.
Jaclyn Karnowski's TechEd team built a 14-day training program. The first 5 days covered platform fundamentals, then engineers spent 9 days on real projects using Airbnb's open-source frameworks. Mentors from the mobile engineering team guided them through it.
45 engineers completed the program and started contributing to mobile work. They merged over 180 pull requests to production. One engineer moved into a full-time iOS role. The team expanded mobile engineering capacity without needing to hire new people.
