Xianwen Chen

CTO & Co-Founder, Netaro

Staff-level engineer with 17+ years shipping products end-to-end — backend, frontend, iOS, Android. Former Staff Engineer at Airbnb, previously Dropbox and RingCentral. Tsinghua University CS. Founded WriteTutor AI in 2025, now building Netaro as CTO.

What I've Built

WriteTutor AI

Founded an AI-powered writing tutor for kids. Took it from zero to paying customers as a solo founder — product, engineering, design, and go-to-market.

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AI-Powered Test Generation

Built a fully automated unit test generation pipeline using LangChain, OpenAI, and Claude at Airbnb. Generated tests outperformed tools like Copilot Chat.

6.7x iOS Build Acceleration

Cut iOS full build times from 33 to 5 minutes at Airbnb. Improved incremental builds by 50%. Saved thousands of engineering hours.

iOS CI Migration to AWS

Technical lead for end-to-end migration of 300+ Mac CI machines to AWS EC2 at Airbnb. Designed the system topology with Terraform. Reduced macOS upgrade time from weeks to hours. Zero incidents.

Airbnb Engineering Blog →

Top 10 in App Store

"Password Manager" reached overall top 10 in 3 countries (2012). 700k+ combined downloads across all apps before acquisition in 2013.

Open Source

Key contributor to Buck Local (Airbnb's fork of Meta's Buck) and Djinni (Dropbox's cross-platform C++ bridge).

Career

Dec 2025 – Present CTO & Co-Founder · Netaro
Apr – Nov 2025 Founder · WriteTutor AI LLC
2019 – 2025 Staff Software Engineer · Airbnb iOS Platform
2016 – 2019 Software Engineer · Dropbox Mobile Platform
2013 – 2015 Senior iOS Engineer → Mobile Platform Team Lead · RingCentral
2008 – 2013 Engineer → Technical Lead · Baidu, NetDragon, and startups

Education

2004 – 2008 B.S. Computer Software · Tsinghua University, Beijing

Skills

Python C++ Swift Ruby AWS Terraform CI/CD Bazel Buck LangChain OpenAI API iOS Android Web