At Airbnb, we build technologies to push our mission forward and support guests, hosts, and local communities. For us, technology is a way to empower people and bring them together. Today marks the next step in our journey to use technology to bring end-to-end magical travel experiences to our global community. Aristotle Balogh is joining Airbnb as our new Chief Technology Officer (CTO), based in San Francisco, and will report to our CEO and Head of Community, Brian Chesky.
Beginning in mid-November, Ari will lead infrastructure, information security and IT, along with engineering for payments, trust, and community support. He will also provide functional leadership for engineering and data science teams across the company.
I’m thrilled Ari is joining Airbnb as our CTO. He has a strong vision for keeping our community at the center of everything we do and every technical decision we make, and an incredible track record of developing leaders and nurturing an inclusive culture.
Brian Chesky, Co-founder, CEO and Head of Community
Ari comes to Airbnb from Google, where he was most recently their Vice President of Engineering, Application Storage, Indexing and Serving. He was responsible for some of the highest-scale infrastructure and data platforms on earth, namely the data systems behind Google Search. Prior to Google, Ari was CTO at Yahoo!, where he led an engineering and product team of 8,000+ and was responsible for Yahoo!’s product development. Before Yahoo!, Ari was EVP, Global Product Development and CTO for VeriSign, Inc.
Airbnb’s mission completely captured my heart. Technology is increasingly getting in the way of human connection. To be part of a company that combines great technology with the opportunity to connect humans in the physical world is awesome. Nothing comes close.
Ari Balogh, incoming Airbnb CTO
Throughout his career, Ari has earned a reputation as an authentic and compassionate leader who builds empowered teams and invests in developing technical careers of the people he leads. He mentors a range of people all over the world, and has been a long-time and public advocate for diversity and inclusion.
As we prepare to welcome Ari, we thank Mike Curtis, our departing Vice President of Engineering, for his incredible leadership over more than five years at Airbnb. Mike scaled our technical teams by 25x and led with humility and character, working tirelessly to prioritize our mission and make values-based decisions.
Ari stood out as someone driven by mission and values, and as a passionate technologist. We’ve worked together in the past and I’ve seen his leadership in action. He’ll bring great experience and perspective to Airbnb.
Mike Curtis, VP of Engineering