In this talk, Surabhi Gupta shares her personal and professional journey—from early exposure to programming, through a graduate focus on natural language processing, to six years at Google building large‑scale machine‑learning products, and finally to joining Airbnb where she founded the Discovery team and helped launch the Experiences vertical. She recounts the challenge of aligning a major career opportunity with the birth of her first child, describing how she chose to take maternity leave despite a critical product launch, and how she returned to work, gradually expanding her leadership scope from 40 to 250 engineers across multiple reorganizations (Trips, Homes). Gupta reflects on the pitfalls of over‑optimizing timing decisions, emphasizing the importance of flexibility, personal values, and intentional career planning. The latter part of the talk focuses on the strategic importance of cultivating a strong relationship with one’s manager—viewed as a sponsor who can advocate, align goals, and navigate disagreements—offering concrete advice for engineers seeking growth. She concludes that there is no single right answer to balancing career advancement and family; the key is to stay true to what feels right and remain adaptable, as unexpected doors can open.
Chapters
Imagine that you're in a role that you love and there's a new opportunity on the horizon. It's one that you've been working towards and that really gives you a much bigger role in your company. At the same time, you're also thinking of starting a family and are wondering what the best time to do that is. What would you do? I was in this situation a couple of years ago, and I'd like to share my story with you. But before I get into that, I'd like to tell you about what got me to Airbnb. I had a fairly straightforward path into tech. I was influenced by my brother. I played computer games, got introduced to programming and computer science. I learned programming actually in after-school classes in high school. I moved to the US for undergrad, and that's actually where I got enthralled by computer science. I realized that it was a tool that I could just apply to so many different fields— biotech, education, and many others. I found my niche in a field called natural language processing, which is about how computers can better understand how humans interact. How do we express ourselves? How do we express ourselves? What do we say? And in senior year of college was when I decided that I wanted to apply to grad school. Now, most of my classmates were all applying for jobs on Wall Street. And it felt a little bit crazy, the path that I was going down, because it was so drastically different from everyone else. I just felt that if I had the comfort of a salary and a well-paying job that I just might not want to go to grad school. I was fortunate that I immensely respected both my advisor and my brother that had done a PhD, and I sort of used that as support to kind of go on that path. I did a lot of research in undergrad and grad school, and I thought that initially that I might want to do a PhD, but then I really liked sort of the the— directly affecting the end user and building real-world applications. And that's what got me to Google. I spent 6 years there as an individual contributor. I learned how to build production systems, how to really build products for the end user, and do machine learning at scale. And sort of, you know, looking back at this, I would say it's— It's important to find that support system that's going to help you pursue your dreams. It's OK to do things that aren't like your peers as long as you have a lot of strong conviction and you know where you're headed. I eventually landed at Airbnb, and I fundamentally believe that planning a trip, planning a travel experience, was just difficult, and we had the power to create really meaningful experiences. I also believe that accommodations, finding a place to stay, was just one part of that entire travel journey. In 2014, I started what we call the Discovery Team, and the goal here was to help guests find and pick a destination. So this was people that were higher up in the intent funnel. And I think this product ended up being a bit ahead of its time. Time, and at the end of the year, we sort of decided to focus on more core search efforts. But the time for this actually came again in 2016. We, as a company, were going to launch a new vertical called Experiences, and we were going to put out this vision for how we want to affect sort of all of travel. It was a very exciting time for the company, and I had something exciting going on in my personal life. I was pregnant with our first baby. And I sort of, at that point, or if I actually think just more generally, I felt that I always wanted to find a job that I was super excited and passionate about and also balance that with, sort of balance work and personal life. And I felt that enough people weren't talking about this. As women, and I think maybe everyone, sort of you want to time things pretty perfectly. How does it work with this job that you're going after or this promotion that you want? And I remember I was having conversations with my husband where I said, you know, maybe we should just wait 2 months because then it'll line up perfectly with this project. And, you know, looking back, it's actually so silly because, you know, there's just so many unknowns with having a baby. And you also just, you know, or when you think of the grand scheme of things, 2 months here or there is nothing. Or even just 6 months. It really doesn't matter. And I sort of got past that. And I was going to be out on leave starting July of last year. And the launch was in November. And at that point, I did feel pretty bummed because I said, OK, what does this mean for my career? It was this great opportunity that I wasn't going to be a part of. And you know, it's a deadline. You're going to go. You can't sort of extend it or anything. And so I went out on leave. And you know, when I came back, I sort of— it was quite an experience actually just getting used to sort of the new normal. I remember that first week I had a goal of coming in at 9:00 AM. And I think I just— it literally was 10:00 AM every single day that I got in. And we had this perk at work where we could take off a day for each week for 8 weeks. And I didn't end up using that. I instead just gave myself a lot more flexibility. And I also told myself that, OK, November and December is going to be just an easier sort of time back into work. And I think this actually also helped me with just what ended up being a role change for me. So my manager ended up leading this new effort, the Trips team, and that meant that there was a role open, and so I took on sort of leading the Umbrella team. And so I went from managing 40 engineers to 100 with that change. And then a few months later, in June of this year, we again reorganized ourselves into businesses, and we brought together a whole bunch of teams and created a new one called Homes. And I lead engineering for that. And I grew my team from 100 to 250. And it was one of those things that if I'd been optimizing so carefully for each step, I might not have even gotten this opportunity. And the lesson that I learned in all of this is that you By closing some door in your personal or in your professional life, you might not know what the impact of that is on your personal life and vice versa. And so really just think of what you want to optimize for. Optimize for what's important to you, because the worst thing is that you have resentment later on. And the final part of my talk is going to be on just that relationship with your manager. So a lot of people talk about how important it is to have a mentor or sponsor, and I agree with that. But I also want to say that cultivating that relationship with your manager is incredibly important. If you think of how you're going to get opportunities at work, your manager has to advocate for you, right? They are the ones that— they might not have the opportunity available, but they are the ones that are going to tell your story and think about you when the right opportunity in the organization comes about. So I would really think of sort of what you, the relationship you have with your manager, and try to think of whether they understand what success means for you and can they connect the dots and line up your career goals with other opportunities. Another thing I want to call out is that disagreement is okay. You know, it's just, your relationship with your manager is just another relationship you have, just as one with your friends. You have to nurture it. If there's tension, you have to get through it. And really understand what's at the root of it. I had something with my manager where we had to figure out how we were going to work together, and it was a new team that I took on from him, and we tried to get to the root of really what was important to us, what was important for the team. And when we worked backwards from there, everything was much easier. So I would say really invest in that relationship with your manager. My manager played a big part in the role that I have today because he was the one that advocated for me to his manager who ran all of engineering. And I'm at this position now at Airbnb, which is exciting. So at the beginning of this talk, I asked you what you would do in my situation. And it's a trick question, really, because there's no wrong answer. And that's what I'd like to leave you with today. When it comes to your life, you should do what feels right to you and be flexible in times of change because you never know what door is going to open up for you in your professional life. Thank you.
