Optimizing Cloud Spend at Airbnb with Melanie Cebula

Melanie Cebula is a staff software engineer at Airbnb who’s focused on cloud infrastructure. She’s a 2016 graduate of UC Berkeley, where she earned a bachelor of arts degree in computer science. Prior to joining Airbnb full-time, she interned there on the payments team. She’s also worked as a teaching assistant at UC Berkeley (CS 164 - Programming Languages and Compilers and CS 61B - Data Structures) and has interned at Facebook, too. Melanie has many opinions, which are her own, and which do not reflect the opinions or views of her employer. Join Corey and Melanie as they discuss the differences between junior, senior, staff, and principal engineers, what a staff engineer’s job looks like at Airbnb, why cloud cost efficiency is a hard-but-great problem to work on, why some engineers are hesitant to turn anything off, how much of optimizing cloud spend involves picking off low-hanging fruit, why it’s more fun to talk to technologists about cloud problems than vendors, how Airbnb uses Kubernetes and what that means for AWS spend analysis, and more.