StaffPlus New York video hub
All the videos from our New York events
StaffPlus New York 2024 videos
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Nail the pitch and stick the landing: How to propose & deliver major technical projects
Learn how to pitch refactor projects effectively. Ei-Nyung shares successful strategies from leading a major infrastructure re-architecture, cutting development time by 65%.
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Slack enterprise key management: Senior to staff lessons
Explore the key lessons and skills Audrei gained during their first Staff+ project, Slack Enterprise Key Management. This talk offers insights for anyone growing in their Staff+ career.
New York • Oct 15 & 16, 2025
Full agendas for LeadDev’s New York events are up! 🎉
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Sometimes you need to be a cruise director
Some problems staff engineers face aren’t about technical expertise, but clarity and decision-making.
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Should we multi-cloud?
Is multi-cloud right for your organization? In this session, Tanu shares a decision-making framework and real examples to help you navigate this complex question.
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The OSS maintainer to staff engineer pipeline
Discover how lessons from open source software maintenance shape effective staff engineers. This talk explores key insights on scaling, influence, and collaboration learned from OSS projects.
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Doing the right thing vs doing things right
Explore how successful companies navigate the tension between correct engineering choices and unexpected user needs. This talk shares lessons from a surprising product release journey.
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With great power comes great responsibility
Learn how today’s systems impact billions of lives and why engineers must prioritize failure safety. This talk explores driving this crucial shift in software engineering.
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Start with an exit in mind: How to be effective by being selfish as a staff engineer
Staff engineers often get overwhelmed by long-term ownership of critical projects. This talk explores how to avoid burnout by starting every project with an exit strategy—whether transferring ownership, pausing or bootstrapping a team.
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Explosive overflow: Lessons from rocket science
Thirty-nine seconds after launch, the Ariane 5 rocket exploded—caused by software design errors. In this talk, Mark analyzes these historical flaws to explore key lessons in resilience and product security. We’ll discuss testing, validation, legacy code, design assumptions, and the challenge of proving when things don’t go wrong.
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Navigators: Connecting execs with StaffPlus engineers to shape strategy
As organizations grow, it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain alignment among individual contributors (ICs), managers, and executives.
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Finding opportunities and maximizing Impact: A staff engineer’s framework
This talk introduces the Listen-Act-Share framework, guiding you to find, evaluate, and scale high-impact projects. Using real examples, like transforming Datadog’s analytics infrastructure, you’ll learn to spot valuable opportunities, invest your time wisely, and iterate after validation. Discover what sets great opportunities apart and how to apply this framework for maximum impact.
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Focus on project value using businesses strategy
Staff+ Engineers often fear working on the wrong projects. This talk explains how that fear stems from misalignment with your company’s business strategy. Learn to identify your company’s strategy, align your projects with it, and communicate value to stakeholders. Maximize your impact by refocusing efforts on work that truly matters.
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Using clinical science to effectively tackle code review anxiety (StaffPlus)
Code review anxiety is often dismissed as a “junior developer issue,” but this talk challenges that misconception with scientific research. Carol Lee shares findings from studies on the causes and effects of code review anxiety, revealing cognitive factors like self-efficacy and bias that worsen it. You’ll also learn about an empirically tested intervention to help developers manage anxiety and create healthier code review cultures.
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Software security as a force of nature
In this keynote talk, Kelly explores principles, practices, and patterns that are actually effective at sustaining systems resilience, from the overlooked to the counterintuitive.
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Psychologically safe reliability management
Lesley explores the challenges of driving observability platform adoption in a multi-product organization, using a case study focused on production readiness for a General Election.
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Simplify streaming application development: A declarative approach at Airbnb
This talk discusses the growing importance of streaming applications in today’s tech landscape and the engineering challenges involved, such as handling multiple data sources and complex transformations.
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The (big) picture of debt
What is the true cost of a choice to e.g. share a database, and what does it take to change it? When is the right time to tackle something like this, and how can we tell? Tali shares experiences with these questions that will set you up for success with your own enormous debt payment.
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Starting from nothing
In this talk, Lawrence shares lessons learned from experiences bootstrapping teams. He’ll draw from experience at GoCardless as a Principal Engineer when leading efforts to build a new Open-Banking payment scheme, and more recently as the engineer who helped go from zero-to-release of the incident.io Status Pages and Catalog products.
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Being a force for cultural change in your organization
Your responsibility to work toward this change also increases dramatically with your privilege. Nicole talks through some concrete ways to magnify the change you effect in your work while doing things you already do anyway.
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Leading your team through a major refactor – don’t be a hero, be a leader
In this talk Dylan shares his experience leading a team through uncharted waters and the lessons learned along the way.
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Substrate engineering: Engineering foundations in a world of LLMs
We need to start investing much more in migrating to better programming languages, building better tooling, and authoring new frameworks where correctness is built in. What does that look like for your engineering organization today?
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Beyond generic goodstuff: Helping teams navigate context
In the dynamic landscape of software engineering, there’s a pervasive allure to what Randall calls “Generic Goodstuff™” – universally lauded practices that seem like silver bullets to team improvement.
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Creating technical leadership in context
This talk will cover how Joy and Nathan overcame challenges at Plaid through the creation of a technical leadership structure parallel to management.
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Self-defense for change agents
In this session Amy will talk about her experiences as a change agent and what she learned about how to do it sustainably, even when the change ahead is drastic.
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When to know you’ve outgrown your monolith and what to do about it
This talk will dive into the most ambitious tech debt paydown project that was ever undertaken at Stripe.
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Reducing infrastructure cost during development and in production
Sally shares lessons learned from her experience at different companies to reduce costs from the product development stage to running a service in production.
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The joy of being staff+
In this session, Leslie Chapman will celebrate what it means to be a senior individual contributor. What better way to close out the conference than with a love letter to what brings us together?
The festival of engineering leadership
London • June 16 & 17, 2025
Videos from previous years of StaffPlus New York
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Unleashing the artist within: Mentoring strategies in software engineering
Rodney Cobb explores the concept of artistry in software engineering, discussing the benefits of unleashing creativity and innovation in our projects.
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From zero to “Brands that Matter” – improving scientific discovery during a pandemic
Vic Vijayakumar tells the story of building a world-class platform starting from zero, and how technical decision-making isn’t always glamorous.
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Leading in context
Patrick Shields explores why Staff+ roles are rarely simple or static, how to adapt your role when things change, and what it means to grow in your own unique path.
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Engineering without borders
Building a large scale project is never easy, but it becomes even more challenging when you’re working with a brand new team scattered across different time zones. Throw in a global pandemic, and you have a recipe for potential disaster.
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Do the hard stuff
Polina Giralt talks about how some of the most impactful technical work is about unwinding a humungous mess. This talk is about lessons learned over my career about executing challenging projects. The types of projects with politics, drama, tech debt, or past failed attempts. How do we know if the project is worth doing? Why has it failed before? Who’s blocking it? How do we know when to cut our losses and pause or cancel the project?
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Strategies for cloud migration
Constantinos Svendinoglou talks about the Data Group at Squarespace which has been on a transformational journey to migrate our systems to the cloud. At the beginning of 2022, we were running entirely on our own hardware; but by the end of 2023 we expect to be 100% cloud native. This talk will cover the strategy, tactics and execution that went into effect to make the migration to being cloud native over possible.
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Leading with vulnerability: A practical guide
Christina Chan shares her personal journey with vulnerability, as she learned to reframe her discomfort as opportunities for growth and eventually find the courage to be vulnerable.
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Building koi pond: simulating millions of slack clients
Join Maude Lemaire for a roller coaster ride of a story and a thrilling live demo of what Slack’s load testing systems can do!
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Say no to burnout and stand up for yourself
Krys Flores reminds us of how to keep yourself in focus while still delivering value. Krys also includes examples of how you can bring yourself back to a place of focus when you feel your organization is trying its best to have you do-all-the-things.
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How to complain positively
Josh Goldberg, a serial complainer with a catchy smile, will walk you through the steps he takes to make sure his complaining is heard and felt without causing pain.
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Building effective relationships
Mike McQuaid discusses the three types of relationships critical to cultivate: mentor, mentee and peer, how to decide which relationships to invest in vs move on from, how to use these relationships to improve your career, your success and work and build up everyone surrounding you and how to still do this when remote or timezone separated from your coworkers.
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Embedding on teams as a staff+ individual contributor
Shweta Bhandare shares her learnings with the process of embedding broken down into stages. For each stage, she will describe the focus areas, key relationships to build and nurture, outcomes to anticipate and finally how to unembed, making the team self-sufficient and self-confident in their ability to deliver.
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Leading without authority: an example from security engineering
In this talk we use the experience of a Security Engineer tasked with helping a development team raise their security posture, without being part of it. We will look at what works and what failed, propose tactic and techniques to best position the outsider in, and what observed results were achieved.
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How much should staff+ engineers code?
Joy Ertz discusses some of the pros and cons of continuing to code, along with how some of Joy and her peers have thought through and continue to think through this decision.
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Building a better bridge
Bryan Liles shares how he came to find out that he was a bridge builder and how that carried through his journey as a senior engineer to where he is today as a VP-level engineer in a public company.
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Solving inefficiency challenges at Datacenter scale
Bobby talks about how a technical solution increased the existing clusters capacity by 9% — resulting in a multi-year saving of 9-figures in CAPEX, by solving inefficiency challenges at datacenter scale.
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Moon to Mars: Planning and executing for the long term
Katie Sylor-Miller looks at how to ensure success when the end goal feels like it’s millions of miles away.
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Accessibility and why everything old is new again
Alice Li climbs into her Wayback Machine and delves into some foundational approaches and processes to facilitate and test for Accessibility compliance on the web.
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Driving clarity in ambiguous projects
Scott Triglia discusses his own approaches (those that have worked and some that haven’t) into a short set of advice.
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Getting to Commitment: Tackling broad technical problems in large organizations
Mattie Toia tackles five areas where you can build metaphorical muscles to help increase the likelihood that your initiatives are successful.
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The Art & Science of Decision Buy-In
John Riviello examines how Comcast has employed the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) through important decision-making.
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Leveraging Your Peers as a Staff Plus Engineer: Building Peer Groups
David Daly looks at how to Learn from your peers and help your peers learn (about peer groups)!
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Starting a new job as a Staff+
Amy Unger looks at how you can effectively start off a new job at Staff-level.
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Strategies for focusing on the most important thing
Ryan Harter advises on the tools to help you strategically combat anti-patterns in prioritization to consistently execute the most important projects.