Shared chapter
Michael Batchelor
Staff Software Engineer at Airbnb · Former VP of Engineering, Bird
Relationship
How we worked together
Michael joined Bird from NationBuilder as a Senior Technical Manager in 2019, while the company was still at an early stage. I was one of his interviewers and strongly supported hiring him. We worked together most closely during Bird's later years, when Michael was leading the engineering organization as VP of Engineering. He recently returned to an individual-contributor role at Airbnb, where he is directly building products and applying AI along the way.
Influence
What I learned
Michael's focus on detail and insistence on supporting decisions with data were phenomenal. He also had a reliable way of bringing me back to earth when my ideas for the next product iteration became too ambitious. Looking back, I genuinely appreciate the balance and rigor he brought to our collaboration.
Projects
Projects we built together
Bird · 2018 – 2025
My story at Bird
Datadog was Michael's daily instrument, and his dashboards were masterpieces. For nearly every question, he could pull up an existing dashboard or build a new one in seconds. His attention to p99 performance, reliability, and anything the team could instrument and improve helped keep Bird's systems grounded in evidence as he led the engineering organization.
Read the case studyBird · 2018 – 2025
Habitat — Bird’s geospatial operating system
Michael worked with Habitat across its evolution into critical Bird infrastructure. His insistence on observability, measurable performance, and evidence-based decisions helped keep foundational systems accountable to real production behavior.
Read the case studyBird · 2020 Hackathon
Birdy AI — a conversational operating system before LLMs
Michael was part of the Birdy hackathon team that built a conversational operating layer for Bird. His systems perspective helped connect an ambitious three-day prototype to the practical realities of the company's production platform.
Read the case studyThemes
The work we shared
Elsewhere