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Day 1 – June 2, 2026
Day 2 – June 3, 2026

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Leading your Organization stage

Arrival and coffee

Talk

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

Welcome to LDX3 London 2026

Host’s opening address.

+ More

Talk

Welcome to LDX3 London 2026

09:00 – 09:14

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Host’s opening address.

  • FEATURING
    Meri Williams
    CTO, NED & AdvisorChromeRose

    Meri is an experienced CTO and leader of technology organisations. They particularly enjoy helping others to level up as technical leaders and managers of organizations by working as a CTO coach and tech advisor / NED to various companies in this capacity through micro-consultancy ChromeRose.

    They have led teams ranging in size from 30 to 300, in a range of organizations from Procter & Gamble, to the Government Digital Service, award-winning online print company MOO, mobile-first challenger bank Monzo and patient-inspired AI-driven rare disease treatment discovery company Healx, amongst others.

    Together with their wife, they run the micro-charity One Goes Up, which supports young women and non-binary folks in pursuing STEM education and careers.

    View Meri’s profile

Talk

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

The state of AI in software development: Insights across 400+ organizations

Learn where AI actually boosts developer productivity, how leading teams measure impact, and practical ways to separate measurable gains from hype.

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Talk

The state of AI in software development: Insights across 400+ organizations

11:50 – 12:15

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Sponsored by

DX x LeadDev

Headlines claim AI is transforming software engineering overnight. Across more than 400 engineering organizations, we see patterns that challenge the hype and reveal what’s really working, and what isn’t, when AI enters the software development lifecycle.

In this talk, Justin Reock, Deputy CTO at DX, will share a data-driven “state of the union” on AI in engineering, grounded in both quantitative data from thousands of developers and on-the-ground observations.

You’ll learn:

  • The current impact of AI, from benchmarks on the percentage of code authored, team PR throughput, and time savings
  • Where AI adoption is creating real gains in throughput, and whether it introduces tradeoffs for quality and maintainability
  • Insights and trends, including whether junior or senior developers are seeing bigger gains, the impact of structured rollouts, which tools are having the most impact, and the evolving definition of “developer”

The session will conclude with a practical framework for measuring AI’s impact, helping leaders cut through hype and understand the impact AI is having in their own organizations.

Key takeaways

Five key questions are used to highlight areas for you to focus your learning:

  • Do we have the right team?
  • Do we have the right technology?
  • Do we have the right product vision?
  • Do we have the right balance between innovation and liability?
  • Do we have the right product <> market fit?
  • FEATURING
    Justin Reock
    Deputy CTODX
    View Justin’s profile

Talk

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

Guardrails, not gates: Scaling juniors in the AI era

How automated guardrails let junior engineers ship faster with AI, while protecting quality, safety, and senior reviewer sanity.

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Talk

Guardrails, not gates: Scaling juniors in the AI era

13:40 – 14:05

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Wise onboards 50 grads annually. AI helps them code fast, but batch size is causing real senior review fatigue. I’ll share how we use automated guardrails to maintain safety without burning out the team.

I’ve spent over a decade leading engineering teams and lately the industry has shifted. Companies are asking why they should hire juniors when AI can just do the work.

At Wise we take the opposite view. We continue to hire 50 graduates every year because we believe AI is a massive enabler for unlocking early careers talent.

However, this opportunity brings a new challenge. AI allows our juniors to move incredibly fast. Our power users are producing 37% more Pull Requests than their peers. This surge in velocity proves their potential, but it brings concerns about work slop and growing PR batch sizes. We simply cannot rely on human reviewers to catch every quality issue in this new volume of code.

In this talk, I will share what guardrails we have put in place to let them move at the speed of a start up. We have introduced systems such as automated canary analysis and engineering maturity checks. This isn’t just about preventing bugs. It is about giving juniors the psychological safety to ship to production and learn faster.

I worry that if we reject early careers now, we lose our next seniors. I’ll share real stories from our academy, like interns fixing production issues on day one. You will leave with a plan to turn the AI uncertainty into your biggest advantage, using guardrails to make high velocity hiring safe and scalable.

Key takeaways

  • Strategies to handle the 37% PR volume spike and increased batch sizes caused by AI-assisted juniors.
  • How to mitigate work slop using your own AI engineering hub.
  • Moving from “Review Gates” to “Production Guardrails” using automated canary analysis.
  • A practical guide for scaling a graduate pipeline by treating AI as a productivity asset, not a replacement.
  • FEATURING
    Rick Clegg
    Developer Experience LeadWise

    Rick is the Developer Experience Lead at Wise, where he owns the internal developer platform built on Backstage. He drives productivity by engineering “paved roads”—golden paths with automated guardrails that balance startup velocity with banking-grade security. With over 20 years of engineering leadership experience, Rick specializes in scaling DevEx and DevOps cultures. He also directs the WiseStart Academy, ensuring early-career engineers are rapidly enabled to contribute meaningfully. Rick is passionate about creating environments where platform engineering allows teams to move fast without breaking things.

    View Rick’s profile

Morning Break

Talk

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

Four dimensions of burnout: Anti-burnout framework for engineering leaders

A practical framework to help engineering leaders recognize burnout early, rebalance demands, and recover while staying effective and healthy.

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Talk

Four dimensions of burnout: Anti-burnout framework for engineering leaders

14:25 – 14:50

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Burnout hits the engaged leaders who keep giving, not the ones who don’t care. Using the four-dimensional burnout model, this talk gives you (and your team) practical tools to recognize, prevent, and recover from burnout.

Here’s what surprised me most about leadership burnout: you have to burn to burn out. It’s not the checked-out managers who struggle – it’s the caring, committed ones.

For the past few years, leaders’ mental well-being has been my main focus. Through coaching engineering managers and navigating high-pressure leadership roles myself, I’ve built a practical framework based on burnout research – including, unexpectedly, parenting psychology.

Typical “just take a vacation” advice ignores why leaders burn out in the first place. Here’s what actually works.

The four dimensions of burnout – exhaustion, emotional distance, loss of meaning, and the gap between who you think you should be and who you actually are. Learn to spot each dimension in yourself and your team before it’s too late.

Resources vs. demands framework – a systematic way to map your emotional, physical, and mental loads against what you actually have available. Find the dangerous imbalances before they become crises.

Early warning signs – specific signals in yourself and your people that you can recognize before full burnout hits.
Action plans for each stage – what to do to prevent it, what to do with first symptoms, what to do if you’re already burned out. Different stages need different strategies.

Supporting others without burning yourself out – the do’s and don’t’s for helping your team and peers through their struggles.

Taking care of yourself is hard, especially for engineering brains that want clear systems. That’s why I built this anti-burnout framework – to turn well-being into something understandable and actually doable. Because the leaders we need most are the ones who care deeply – and we need you to stay healthy.

Key takeaways

  • Four-dimensional burnout assessment – recognize exhaustion, emotional distance, loss of efficacy, and identity conflict in yourself and your team before crisis hits
  • Resources vs. demands audit – map your emotional, physical, and mental loads to spot dangerous imbalances early
  • Stage-specific action plans – different strategies for prevention, early symptoms, and full burnout with concrete next steps for each
  • Early warning signals checklist – specific, recognizable signs you can spot in yourself and your people
  • Support playbook – do’s and don’ts for helping burned-out colleagues while protecting your own well-being
  • FEATURING
    Dominika Rogala
    Founder and Leadership CoachGood Job Coffee

    Dominika is a founder, leadership coach, and mentor at Good Job Coffee. She helps people grow not just as professionals, but as whole individuals. Her approach is rooted in human-centered management, empathy, and radical honesty. As a speaker, she shares insights on leadership, team dynamics, and career development.

    She served as VP of Engineering at NeuroDevice, and Engineering Manager at Vector Technologies and Intel. As a mother of three, she brings unique parenting insights to team development.

    When she wants to celebrate something, you’ll find her with a good cup of coffee – hence the name Good Job Coffee!

    View Dominika’s profile

Talk

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

Inclusive leadership across cultures: Practical patterns for global engineering teams

Concrete, repeatable patterns for leading global teams across cultures, reducing friction, building trust, and helping diverse voices contribute fully.

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Talk

Inclusive leadership across cultures: Practical patterns for global engineering teams

10:05 – 10:30

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Practical, repeatable inclusive-leadership patterns for global engineering teams—aligning assumptions on hierarchy, disagreement, and feedback using working agreements, inclusive meeting mechanics, decision recaps, and repair scripts to build trust and move faster.

Global teams don’t fail because people lack good intentions—they fail because they carry different assumptions about hierarchy, feedback, speed, and what “good work” looks like. Inclusive leadership across cultures is less about slogans and more about building shared operating agreements that make collaboration safe and predictable.

Drawing on my experience as the only African Joint Institute Student Ambassador in a UK–China AI institute partnership, and my leadership roles coordinating large technical cohorts in Nigerian higher education (including supervising/appraising 50+ technologists and leading a lab through external accreditation), I’ll share a practical toolkit for leading across cultural divides.

We’ll cover three common cross-cultural failure modes and how to fix them:

  1. Silence vs disagreement — how to surface dissent without forcing confrontation.
  2. Hierarchy vs challenge — how to invite “safe pushback” and avoid decision-by-deference.
  3. Direct vs indirect feedback — how to give clarity without disrespect, and how to receive feedback without defensiveness.

You’ll learn lightweight mechanisms you can adopt immediately: a “Working Agreements” template, inclusive meeting patterns (pre-reads, async input, rotating airtime), a decision recap format, and scripts for repairing misunderstandings when identity and power dynamics are in play.

You’ll leave with repeatable patterns to help distributed teams move faster—with less friction, more trust, and more meaningful participation.

Key takeaways

  • A Working Agreements template for cross-cultural teams (communication, decision-making, feedback norms)
  • Inclusive meeting patterns that reduce time-zone and hierarchy bias
  • Scripts for disagreement, feedback, and repair after a cultural misread
  • A decision recap format that increases clarity and reduces “re-litigating” decisions
  • Practical ways to turn representation into belonging (not just diversity metrics)

  • FEATURING
    Christopher Egemba
    CEOLightenet Technologies

    Christopher Egemba is an Artificial Intelligence and IT consultant with 15+ years’ experience across lab operations. He earned an MSc in Artificial Intelligence and Adaptive Systems from the University of Sussex , UK (2024) and a BSc in Computer Science. At Nnamdi Azikiwe University, he was Head of Laboratory, leading labs through Universities Commission accreditation and coordinating and appraising 50+ technologists. He represented Sussex as the only African Joint Institute Student Ambassador with Zhejiang Gongshang University, China supporting students and developing capability. A Sussex Nigeria Scholarship recipient, he won the Spirit of Sussex Gold Award and was a Pitch for the Planet competition finalist.

    View Christopher’s profile

Lunch Break

Talk

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

AI killed the coding interviews. Here’s what Meta built instead

How Meta replaced traditional coding interviews with AI-native hiring that measures adaptability, communication, and real-world engineering judgment.

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Talk

AI killed the coding interviews. Here’s what Meta built instead

10:55 – 11:20

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

When Meta’s senior engineers couldn’t explain ‘vibe-coding,’ we knew something broke. Traditional leadership tools failed, and we had to evolve. Learn how, at Meta, we changed how we hire, evaluate, and lead.

A while back, during one of Meta’s new hire orientations, a senior manager froze when new hires asked him about “vibe-coding.” He nodded politely but clearly had no idea what they meant. That moment exposed more than a generational gap, it was a warning; The gap between how fast technology evolves and how fast leaders adapt is widening, and we must do something about it. ASAP.

Junior engineers now arrive with AI superpowers. The competitive advantage shifted from raw technical skill to adaptation speed, from code quality to communication, and from knowing frameworks to catching AI hallucinations. This forced Meta to rethink how we hire, evaluate, and lead.

We built AI-native coding interviews that measure adaptation, not memorization. We learned to evaluate talent without the traditional technical signals, and shifted the skills we look for when hiring, promoting, and assessing performance.

We also changed how we lead: leaders have to use AI themselves before teaching their teams. They learn to adapt , rather than using specific tools, so they can evaluate whatever shows up next. They needed to learn how to leverage AI without the price of dependency. We realized AI accelerates junior engineers faster than any technology we’ve seen, but despite the panic about job losses, AI can help ambitious engineers break in and move up, but only if their leaders understand how to guide them.

In this talk, I’ll share what we learned, and the frameworks we developed. I’ll share the mistakes we made, and what actually works when there’s no playbook. You’ll leave knowing what skills matter now, how to evaluate talent differently, and how to lead when yesterday’s answers don’t apply anymore.

Key takeaways

  • AI-native coding interviews: How we rebuilt coding interviews to evaluate adaptation and not memorization.
  • New evaluation criteria: What skills actually predict engineering success when AI changes the competitive advantage
  • Leadership frameworks for AI adoption: How to train leaders to use AI themselves and guide teams without creating dependency
  • Data-backed insights on junior engineers: Why AI accelerates junior engineers faster than any previous technology and how to leverage that effectively despite job loss fears
  • FEATURING
    Danit Nativ Navon
    Software Engineer ManagerMeta

    At Meta, Danit pioneered AI-enabled coding interviews, making it the first major tech company to adopt AI-native evaluation for engineering talent.

    She also coaches leaders through AI-driven change and helps new hires to integrate AI skills into Meta’s engineering environment. A self-described late adopter who chose to evolve rather than fall behind, Danit now helps others step confidently into the AI era. Her global journey across Israel, Singapore, Mexico, and London informs her practical,
    people-first approach to engineering leadership.

    View Danit’s profile

Talk

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

The story box

Learn how to use stories to improve your influence as a leader.

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Talk

The story box

09:20 – 09:45

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

In this talk, Michael Lopp will tell you a story about stories. From almost 30 years of leadership, Lopp will not only tell you stories from Slack, Pinterest, Netscape, Borland, and that start-up you’ve never heard of, but also why the art of storytelling is integral to your leadership toolkit.

Key takeaways

  • The reasons humans like to hear and read stories.
  • Why stories work for leaders.
  • The core parts of a good story.

  • FEATURING
    Michael Lopp
    Founder of Rands Slack, Author of Managing Humans

    Michael Lopp is a veteran Silicon Valley-based engineering leader who builds both people and product at historic companies such as Slack, Borland, Netscape, Palantir, Pinterest, and Apple. When he’s not deeply worrying about staying relevant, he writes about backpacks, bridges, humans, and leadership at the popular weblog, Rands in Repose. He currently works at Apple. This is the way.

    View Michael’s profile

Talk

Experienced Manager•New Manager•Tech Lead

Growing from ICs to Managers

Clear signals, habits, and opportunities that help individual contributors grow into effective managers long before the title changes.

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Talk

Growing from ICs to Managers

09:10 – 09:35

This session is suitable for:

Experienced Manager New Manager Tech Lead

Your future leaders are already on your teams. They span every level from junior engineers to staff engineers, and they’re watching closely. They’re learning not just from what you say, but from how you lead, how you make decisions, and how you create opportunities for others.

So, how do we intentionally prepare individual contributors for leadership roles? How do we equip them with the skills, context, and confidence to step into leadership roles and succeed as top-tier managers within our organizations?

Because scaling teams doesn’t start with headcount or org charts. It starts with scaling yourself as a leader.

  • FEATURING
    Charles Duncan
    Senior Engineering LeaderNetflix

    Charles Duncan Jr. is an Senior Engineering Leader at Netflix, where he leads teams that drive global user acquisition and fan engagement. Previously, he was a VP leading Engineering and Product teams at firms supporting clients such as Apple, Nike and NBC/Peacock. Charles is renowned for his leadership in innovation and creativity. Passionate about diversity, he advocates for greater representation in tech and creative industries, inspired by his early work in technology education for underserved communities. Charles remains dedicated to mentoring and fostering change in the industry.

    View Charles’s profile

Afternoon Break

Talk

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

Rethinking how distributed teams deliver complex tech

Practical patterns for delivering complex work across distributed teams while improving inclusion, decision quality, and team autonomy.

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Talk

Rethinking how distributed teams deliver complex tech

16:10 – 16:35

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

A practical playbook for empowering individuals and delivering complex technical products across distributed teams without sacrificing inclusion or autonomy.

In a world where teams are more distributed than ever, managers and senior ICs need to evolve their collaboration styles and step into the future of work. Gone are the days of huddling 10 people in a room with a whiteboard, dry erase markers, sticky notes and way too much coffee in the hope that somehow intellectual osmosis happens and we’re miraculously all aligned. That approach does kinda get the job done, let’s be honest here, but while we’re at the honesty bit, let’s also concede that eating a hamburger with a spoon also gets the job done with the same degree of efficiency.

Old-school collab can also lend itself heavily to the “get in that room and don’t come out til you’re done” vibe that not only strips autonomy and trust away from our most highly respected engineers but also creates ridiculously expensive meetings (hello, 6 staff engineers and 2 principals in one room). Don’t get me started on the impact this has on inclusion (and yes, I still care deeply about this, and you should too).

In my experience, some of the best technical decisions have been a byproduct of allowing folk to simmer over what was being discussed — to think asynchronously, sketch ideas in their own time, pressure-test assumptions, and come back sharper. The quieter, more pensive folk who aren’t the loudest in meetings tend to stare deeply into the Miro/Notion abyss… sometimes with a little help from modern tools that help them organise thoughts or explore alternatives — and then → lightbulb!

Inclusion isn’t giving someone your paint and letting them paint their own canvas. It’s allowing people to add colour to your monochromatic genius and, fam, this method we’ve been using to fuel some of our biggest projects in Pleo has resulted in some pretty spectacular technicolor masterpieces!

If you’ll have me, I have some A-M-A-Z-I-N-G tips and tricks to share about how to successfully build and launch technically complex features requiring cross-domain/cross-team collaboration with engineers, PMs and domain leads distributed all over this beautiful blue speck of ours (aka the Earth), while empowering our teams to be the best versions of themselves yet.

The next evolution of collaboration is human-led, AI-assisted, and designed to amplify thinking and level the playing field — so no one feels like they don’t belong.

Key takeaways

  • A clear picture of what effective collaboration looks like in 2026 and beyond – moving past synchronous, room-centric rituals toward more inclusive, distributed ways of working.
  • Why empowering engineers and cross-functional partners isn’t a “nice to have,” but a practical lever for higher engagement, better technical decisions, and faster, more sustainable delivery.
  • Concrete patterns for enabling asynchronous thinking that give quieter voices space to contribute and improve the quality of outcomes.
  • Real-world examples from complex, cross-domain initiatives showing what worked, what didn’t, and what we’d do differently next time.
  • Actionable techniques attendees can apply immediately in their next project – from shaping collaboration norms to structuring work so teams can do their best thinking.
  • FEATURING
    Diane-Lee Pretorius
    Senior Engineering ManagerPleo

    Diane Lee Pretorius is an engineering leader who thrives at the intersection of people, systems, and delivery. With over a decade of experience across startups and global organisations, she specialises in building empowered, high-performing teams that ship complex technical products in distributed environments. D-Lee is known for her human-first approach to leadership, pairing strong technical judgement with inclusive collaboration and asynchronous ways of working. Passionate about mentoring and growing future leaders, she shares practical lessons from real-world delivery to help engineering teams work better together.

    View Diane-Lee’s profile

Talk

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager

The AI-augmented leader: Architecting your own virtual Chief of Staff

A practical case study on building a personal AI assistant to reduce context switching, automate management work, and reclaim strategic focus.

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Talk

The AI-augmented leader: Architecting your own virtual Chief of Staff

15:10 – 15:35

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager

Engineers have Cursor; leaders play “Calendar Tetris.” This case study shows how to build a personal AI assistant using commercial tools. Learn to automate toil, manage high-volume context, and reclaim time for strategic impact.

The AI market is currently obsessed with the Individual Contributor. Tools like Cursor and Cloud Code have revolutionized the IDE, allowing engineers to ship features and crush complexity at record speeds. But as Engineering Leaders, we have been largely left out of this revolution. Our “IDE” isn’t a code editor; it is a fragmented ecosystem of calendars, documents, and messaging apps.

While our teams move faster, we find ourselves bogged down, playing “Calendar Tetris” and drowning in context switching. Since the release of ChatGPT 2.5, I have been on a mission to fix this imbalance. I wanted to answer a simple question: Can I build a personal AI assistant that actually understands the context of engineering leadership?

In this session, I will walk you through the architecture of my personal AI system built using existing commercial tools. We will move beyond basic chat prompts and look at how to automate the “heavy lifting” of management. We will cover how to use AI to:

  • Streamline meeting preparation and context gathering.
  • Stay on top of a high volume of conversations across multiple teams and projects.
  • Reduce the manual toil required for operational data analysis.
  • Act as a “strategic coach” to help you prioritize between short-term fires and long-term goals.

You will leave with a blueprint for building your own assistant—one that handles the noise so you can focus on the signal, the strategy, and your people.

Key takeaways

  • The “”Leader’s Stack””: A walkthrough of the specific commercial tools and integrations used to build a low-maintenance, high-impact personal assistant.
  • Managing Scale: How to use AI to summarize and track context across dozens of concurrent streams without losing the details.
  • The AI Coach: Techniques for using LLMs to analyze your schedule and tasks, helping you enforce prioritization between the urgent and the important.
  • From Toy to Tool: How to move past the novelty of LLMs and make it into a centralised IDE that help you become a more impactful leader?

  • FEATURING
    Simone Casciaroli
    Head of EngineeringKraken

    Simone Casciaroli is a technology leader who specialises in enabling autonomous teams to continuously and incrementally ship value to customers. Simone has spent the last two decades leading product and platform teams across startups and scale-ups (Now TV, Babylon Health, Onto, Doccla) with roles at the intersection of delivery, product, and technology. Simone has co-founded two health and personal development startups and recently joined Kraken Technology as Head of Engineering.

    View Simone’s profile

Talk

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

End of day wrap-up

Host’s closing remarks.

+ More

Talk

End of day wrap-up

17:50 – 17:55

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Host’s closing remarks.

  • FEATURING
    Meri Williams
    CTO, NED & AdvisorChromeRose

    Meri is an experienced CTO and leader of technology organisations. They particularly enjoy helping others to level up as technical leaders and managers of organizations by working as a CTO coach and tech advisor / NED to various companies in this capacity through micro-consultancy ChromeRose.

    They have led teams ranging in size from 30 to 300, in a range of organizations from Procter & Gamble, to the Government Digital Service, award-winning online print company MOO, mobile-first challenger bank Monzo and patient-inspired AI-driven rare disease treatment discovery company Healx, amongst others.

    Together with their wife, they run the micro-charity One Goes Up, which supports young women and non-binary folks in pursuing STEM education and careers.

    View Meri’s profile

Networking Mixer

Making technical choices stage

Arrival and coffee

Talk

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

Welcome to LDX3 London 2026

Host’s opening address.

+ More

Talk

Welcome to LDX3 London 2026

09:00 – 09:14

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Host’s opening address.

  • FEATURING
    Suhail Patel
    Principal EngineerMonzo

    Suhail is the Principal Engineer at Monzo focused on building the Core Banking and Infrastructure Platform. His role involves serving as a technical authority on Monzo’s infrastructure which spans over two thousand microservices and leverages key infrastructure components like Kubernetes, Cassandra, Kafka, Etcd and more. He focuses specifically in investigating deviant behaviour and ensuring services continue to work reliably in the face of a constantly shifting environment in the cloud.

    View Suhail’s profile

Talk

Experienced Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

The agent loop: A glimpse inside Cursor

Lessons from building and trusting AI coding agents through evals noisy feedback and deployment realities.

+ More

Talk

The agent loop: A glimpse inside Cursor

14:25 – 14:50

This session is suitable for:

Experienced Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

At Cursor, we’re on the edge of the edge: we’re both builders and heavy users of AI-assisted development tools, which means we feel the gap between “it seems to work” and “we trust it enough to ship” more acutely than most. We’ve spent a lot of time trying to close that gap — building evals, interpreting usage data, and navigating the surprisingly tricky question of how to train and deploy models when your feedback signal is noisy and your users have very high expectations.

This talk gives an honest look at where we are: what our validation process looks like today, what the data from millions of engineering sessions has taught us, where it’s left us with more questions than answers, and what we wish we’d known earlier about the operational realities of running our own models.

If you’re building in this space and finding that the standard playbook doesn’t quite fit, this one’s for you.

  • FEATURING
    Maude Lemaire
    EngineerCursor

    Maude is an engineer at Cursor, working on the big, thorny problems that come hand-in-hand with rapid growth. Previously, she was a Principal Engineer at GitHub, where she worked on Copilot Code Review, data partitioning, and domain isolation.

    Before GitHub, Maude was a Senior Staff Engineer at Slack, where she founded and led the backend performance infrastructure team. Over nearly 8 years, she was responsible for large-scale load test tooling, performance regression monitoring, and successfully onboarding the world’s largest companies to Slack as the product scaled from 60,000 users per team to over 2 million.

    When she doesn’t have her nose in a flamegraph, you can find Maude building strong, empathetic engineering cultures.
    In October 2020, Maude published “Refactoring at Scale” with O’Reilly Media, a blueprint for how technical leaders can successfully navigate large, complex refactors.

    View Maude’s profile

Talk

Experienced Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

Shipping secure, reliable and high performance AI agents

A hands-on engineering guide to building AI agents that stay secure, reliable, and fast in real, high-stakes production systems.

+ More

Talk

Shipping secure, reliable and high performance AI agents

17:05 – 17:30

This session is suitable for:

Experienced Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

We dive into the technical details of three areas in the context of shipping AI agents: security, reliability and performance.

This is a talk written by engineers, for engineers. At Gradient Labs we build AI agents for financial services companies. In this talk, we share techniques and best practices that we’ve developed in shipping AI agents in high-stakes environments. Specifically, we cover three areas, outlined below.

Security

We talk about how we apply the principle of least privilege to AI agents, as well as some specific practical examples where we’ve had to think through security (e.g. identity verification with voice agents).

Reliability

We talk about how we handle failures, rate limits, latency spikes, durable execution and retries, as well as how we protect our agent from external factors like spikes in load.

Performance

We talk about testing non-deterministic systems using production conversations as test fixtures, LLM-as-judge evaluation, and the metrics that actually predict customer satisfaction.

Key takeaways

  • How to manage the risk of AI agents reading sensitive data and performing high-stakes actions
  • How to ensure reliable execution in the presence of failures when working with AI agents
  • How to test AI agents when traditional unit tests don’t work; synthetic evaluation pipelines, LLM-as-judge, and metrics that catch regressions before customers do
  • FEATURING
    Danai Antoniou
    Co-Founder & Chief ScientistGradient Labs

    Danai is the Co-Founder and Chief Scientist at Gradient Labs.

    Previously, she was a Staff Machine Learning Engineer at Monzo, where she led the creation of an industry-first fraud detection system. Prior to that: JustEat and Oxford.

    View Danai’s profile
  • Devan Kuleindiren
    EngineerGradient Labs

    Devan is an Engineer at Gradient Labs.

    Previously, he was a Senior Staff Engineer at Monzo, where he worked on financial crime and customer support. Prior to that: Google and Cambridge.

    View Devan’s profile

Morning Break

Talk

Staff+•Tech Lead

Building for reliability

Reliability emerges from systems, teams, and decisions. Learn how to design, operate, and scale it intentionally.

+ More

Talk

Building for reliability

12:40 – 13:05

This session is suitable for:

Staff+ Tech Lead

Building reliable systems is a core tenet of good engineering. Yet, when reliable components are glued together, deviant behaviour often emerges. These can manifest as tricky bugs that take significant time and effort to identify, or broader incidents that hamper availability. Reliability needs to be considered across the sum of all parts rather than in just individual components.

The Monzo engineering teams have built the UKs largest digital bank from scratch over a period of many years. In this talk, Matej discusses lessons learned and the properties engineering organisations need to have to build and maintain reliability at the core.

  • FEATURING
    Matej Pfajfar
    CTOMonzo

    Matej Pfajfar is the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Monzo, the UK’s largest digital bank with more than 13m customers. Before joining Monzo, Matej was an Engineering Director at Google from 2018, where he led engineering teams on Android. Prior to that, Matej was the Executive Director of Adacta, where he worked for nearly 16 years and led the development of one of the top rated core systems for insurance. Matej holds a Computer Science degree from the University of Cambridge.

    View Matej’s profile

Talk

Tech Lead

Things fall apart – Architecture to avoid progressive collapse

How to design systems so small failures stay contained, preventing cascading outages and large-scale architectural collapse.

  • Sam Newman Sam Newman & Associates
    Independent Tech Consultant & Author
+ More

Talk

Things fall apart – Architecture to avoid progressive collapse

09:20 – 09:45

This session is suitable for:

Tech Lead

Small things going wrong can quickly snowball. The cascading failure is often a nightmare scenario for any system. An initial problem, which in isolation seems like such a minor problem, can kick off a chain reaction of ever-increasing failures, potentially leading to catastrophic results.

When a failure of a single component results in the failure of other connected elements, this is known as a progressive collapse. In this talk, Sam Newman looks at this phenomenon in more detail, and he’ll examine how it has manifested in major disasters. Based on lessons learned from other industries, Sam will share three key techniques that can be used to mitigate against the progressive collapse occurring in your own system.

This talk will help you understand how to architect your systems in such a way that small failures stay small.

  • FEATURING
    Sam Newman
    Independent Tech Consultant & AuthorSam Newman & Associates
    Sam Newman is an independent consultant who loves solving problems with technology. Focusing primarily in the areas of cloud, microservice architecture and continuous delivery, Sam works with companies big and small all over the world. He is also an experienced conference speaker, and author of the O’Reilly books Monolith To Microservices, Building Microservices, and the forthcoming Building Resilient Distributed Systems.
    View Sam’s profile

Lunch Break

Talk

Staff+•Tech Lead

Game time: A playbook to (unsuccessfully) 10x in a week and (successfully) 10x in a year

A candid scaling story about why rushed 10x efforts fail, and how disciplined metrics, culture, and architecture win over time.

+ More

Talk

Game time: A playbook to (unsuccessfully) 10x in a week and (successfully) 10x in a year

09:10 – 09:35

This session is suitable for:

Staff+ Tech Lead

Regardless of if someone is going through hypergrowth, just onboarding their first customers, or has already scaled ten times over, this talk will cover how to not let perfect get in the way of good when on a tight timeline, and how “more time” needs to be paired with removal of bias towards existing patterns, continuous cross-functional advocacy, and strong metrics and milestones to drive success.

“If you build it, they will come” works great for sports fiction, but the reality is we don’t start out building for scale – we build to see if it works first. For some, the scale never comes. For one telehealth company, the scale came pretty much overnight – and we fumbled it pretty hard.

In this talk, we’ll follow the story of how to prepare for high scale (and the gotchas that got us) with a scrappier approach in a seven-day timeframe, and how having more time alone didn’t guarantee us the win next time around. We’ll dive into the playbook for scaling the architecture while operating it in parallel – not only the services and tools, but also the larger technical strategy and cultural shifts that were required to break us out of our structural slump and help us score a major scaling goal.

When approaching scaling challenges (or any large system-wide architectural challenge):

  • Start somewhere – don’t let perfect be the enemy of good
  • More time does not mean better outcomes on its own
  • Understand your critical path and follow it from start to finish
  • Find your guiding metric/north star and measure against it regularly and consistently

We will discuss load testing tooling, automation approaches, system benchmarking, as well as organizational/technical strategy elements.

  • FEATURING
    Plum Ertz
    Senior Director, EngineeringRo

    Plum Ertz is a Senior Director of Engineering, baker of noms, and casual economist, with a degree in one of those things. Their main areas of expertise are on the front end, with a focus on accessibility and web standards. They have applied those skills as employee number 8 and number 800 in the marketing, media, and fintech spaces, building everything from interactive multimedia experiences at live events to quizzes about sexy fruits. Plum is presently bolstering a strong culture of accessibility in the direct-to-patient healthcare space as a Director of Software Engineering at Ro.

    View Plum’s profile

Afternoon Break

Talk

Staff+•Tech Lead

Updatable repos: Duolingo’s journey to a golden path

A real-world story of reducing microservice sprawl by embedding best practices into templates that teams actually want to adopt.

+ More

Talk

Updatable repos: Duolingo's journey to a golden path

14:35 – 15:00

This session is suitable for:

Staff+ Tech Lead

Facing fragmented microservices, Duolingo launched a Golden Path to standardize development. By packaging best practices into templates with superior tooling and automated security, adoption followed organically, boosting velocity without mandates while empowering autonomous engineering teams.

After more than a decade of rapid growth, Duolingo’s microservice ecosystem was highly functional, but also highly fragmented. This technical diversity created significant friction, slowing down developer velocity and making consistent security and maintenance a formidable challenge. To address this, we initiated a “Golden Path” project to standardize how services are built and operated, but we immediately confronted a classic dilemma: how to drive adoption across autonomous engineering teams without affecting productivity. The traditional “stick” approach of enforcing mandates from the top-down felt counter to our culture, while a “carrot” approach required genuine value to development teams in order to gain long-term traction. For example, security, while its importance was universally acknowledged in principle, in practice it was often deprioritized by developers focused on shipping features.

Our breakthrough came from realizing that we could use our existing microservice templates as the central place to improve and commit standards, essentially treating repositories as updatable packages. Instead of prescribing standards from the top down, we systematically identified, refined, and codified the best practices and tools that had emerged organically within our engineering culture over the past ten years. We focused on making the Golden Path the path of least resistance by providing superior tooling, faster build and deployment times, and automated security that was seamlessly integrated and provided immediate benefits to existing microservices. This transformed security and cost controls from compliance burdens into free features. By standardizing our most successful homegrown solutions, we achieved widespread adoption not through heavy enforcement, but by offering a tangible competitive advantage that empowers our developers to build faster and more securely.

Key takeaways

  • Top-down mandates can conflict with culture, focus on “carrots” not “sticks”
  • Existing service templates can be treated as updatable packages to embed and evolve standards
  • AI code migration tools work better for what is unique about a service, static tools work better for what is common among services
  • Identify and codify homegrown best practices rather than a brand new set of standards if possible
  • Make the Golden Path the easiest option to drive voluntary, rather than forced adoption
  • FEATURING
    Max Blaze
    Senior Staff Platform EngineerDuolingo

    Max is a Senior Staff Platform Engineer at Duolingo and is currently optimizing infrastructure for cost, stability, and compliance through standardization and automation. Before diving into the chaotic world of cloud computing, he managed application operations for multiple physical data centers in the healthcare sector. Max holds an MS and Certificate of Advanced Study in Telecommunications from the University of Pittsburgh, where he focused on network security and critical infrastructure.

    View Max’s profile

Talk

Experienced Manager•Tech Lead

Quantifying technical debt to modernise critical systems

A data-driven approach to exposing hidden technical debt and modernizing critical legacy systems without risky rewrites.

+ More

Talk

Quantifying technical debt to modernise critical systems

11:05 – 11:30

This session is suitable for:

Experienced Manager Tech Lead

Replacing a 20-year-old system while remaining on-air is the ultimate engineering stress test. Talk shares ITV’s framework for visualising “invisible” technical debt to justify the modernisation of critical infrastructure, moving from gut-feel to data-driven decommissioning.

Every engineering leader fears the “untouchable” legacy system, the 20-year-old monolith that runs the core business but blocks innovation.
At ITV, this was our linear scheduling infrastructure, a critical system underpinning our broadcast channels, yet it was effectively difficult to maintain and manage.

We couldn’t afford a high-risk “big bang” rewrite, nor could we let the debt continue to accumulate. In this session, I will share the “Technical Debt Framework” that we used to derisk this modernisation.

We moved beyond the abstract by categorising debt (Visible vs. Invisible, Positive vs. Negative Value) to secure stakeholder buy-in on a modernisation strategy.

I will cover:

  • The “Visible vs. Invisible” Matrix: How to map architectural decay against business risk to show non-technical leadership why a “working” system is actually closer to failure.
  • A Case Study: The specific engineering trade-offs of modernising an old estate, including the decision to build tactical in-house microservices versus adopting third-party tooling.
  • The “25% Rule”: The road we took to identify the operational reality of negotiating a fixed capacity for debt repayment to prevent the “spiral of reduced morale and productivity.

Key takeaways

  • A Classification Framework: A practical model for categorising debt (Architecture vs. Code vs. Infrastructure) to make “invisible” drag visible to the C-suite.
  • Modernisation Strategy: How to choose between a tactical in-house rebuild and third-party vendor adoption when replacing core legacy systems.
  • Observability for Operationalising Repayment: How to implement a standard approach that allocates up to 25% of sprint capacity to debt servicing without derailing product delivery.

  • FEATURING
    Ejber Ozkan
    Director of EngineeringITV

    Ejber Ozkan is a seasoned technology executive with more than 25 years of experience in cloud architecture, platform engineering, and IT strategy. As Director of Engineering at ITV, he leads high-performing teams and delivers large-scale digital transformation initiatives that drive measurable business impact. Known for his collaborative leadership style, Ejber excels at stakeholder engagement, technical strategy, and aligning engineering excellence with organizational goals through innovative, scalable solutions.

    View Ejber’s profile

Talk

Staff+•Tech Lead

Don’t wait for an outage to improve your reliability

Build confidence, train teams, and validate safeguards by stress testing systems realistically before outages force painful learning.

+ More

Talk

Don’t wait for an outage to improve your reliability

16:20 – 16:45

This session is suitable for:

Staff+ Tech Lead

A reliable system isn’t just about your infrastructure. Learn to effectively leverage game days to train engineers and build resilience before real incidents force you to.

No one likes responding to incidents – but they’re also where you learn the most. Every outage reveals weaknesses across your systems and processes that you might not have found any other way.

The problem is, waiting for your biggest incidents isn’t a realistic strategy for building a more reliable system. You can introduce stress tests or extrapolate worst-case behaviours, but there’s an unpredictability to how systems and people behave in combination under real pressure that is hard to fully account for.

Game days are your opportunity to test that combination without frantic firefighting. If you’re not running realistic tests, your safeguards are theoretical: you don’t want to learn whether they work in a disaster scenario.

At incident.io, we use game days to train engineers, validate fixes from past outages, and build genuine confidence in our systems and response processes. Most recently, we ran game days to successfully validate that we would be resilient in the face of an AWS outage. Every time we run a game day, engineers are asking when the next one will be.

It’s easy to run a simple drill, but half the value of a game day comes from thorough preparation. Figuring out what’s actually feasible to break gives you confidence in the parts of your system that are solid. Finding the holes you *can* poke through gives you avenues to follow up, even before you’ve run anything. And preparing for the different response paths your engineers might take lets you create realistic pressure, making it feel like a real incident rather than a repetitive drill.

In this this talk, I’ll cover what we’ve learned running game days, and how you can get the most value out of them. Running a successful game day can make your systems more resilient, but you’ll also be building a culture of reliability in your organisation.

Key takeaways

  • Why game days are one of the most effective tools for reliability and getting ahead of the next potential outage
  • Learn to run efficient and worthy game days that can give you both confidence in your systems and a clear list of areas to improve, as well as a chance for your engineers to experience realistic pressure without risking production
  • How to build a culture of reliability by making game days and incidents something engineers find valuable and want to repeat

  • FEATURING
    Leo Papaloizos
    Product Engineerincident.io

    Leo Papaloizos is currently a Product Engineer at incident.io. She was part of the foundational team that built their On-call product, which thousands of responders use to get paged for their most critical issues. She loves building products that get used daily. Through her experience of building and using an On-call product, she’s developed a particular interest in making what might be the most stressful time of someone’s week the least stressful it can be.

    In her spare time, she plays football and knits.

    View Leo’s profile

Talk

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

End of day wrap-up

Host’s closing remarks.

+ More

Talk

End of day wrap-up

17:50 – 17:55

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Host’s closing remarks.

  • FEATURING
    Suhail Patel
    Principal EngineerMonzo

    Suhail is the Principal Engineer at Monzo focused on building the Core Banking and Infrastructure Platform. His role involves serving as a technical authority on Monzo’s infrastructure which spans over two thousand microservices and leverages key infrastructure components like Kubernetes, Cassandra, Kafka, Etcd and more. He focuses specifically in investigating deviant behaviour and ensuring services continue to work reliably in the face of a constantly shifting environment in the cloud.

    View Suhail’s profile

Networking Mixer

Building for production stage

Arrival and coffee

Talk

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

Welcome to LDX3 London 2026

Host’s opening address.

+ More

Talk

Welcome to LDX3 London 2026

09:00 – 09:14

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Host’s opening address.

  • FEATURING
    Sarah Wells
    Independent Technical Consultant & Author

    Sarah is a technology leader, consultant and conference speaker with a focus on engineering effectiveness, microservices, incident management, platform engineering, optimising for flow and technical strategy. She has over 20 years’ experience as a developer, principal engineer and tech director across product, platform, SRE and DevOps teams.

    She spent over a decade working at the Financial Times, as it transformed from 12 releases a year to more than 20,000, embracing autonomous empowered teams and adopting microservices, DevOps, containers and platform engineering.

    She is the author of the O’Reilly book Enabling Microservice Success: Managing Technical, Organizational and Cultural Challenges.

    View Sarah’s profile

Talk

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

Engineering at scale: Why developer experience is your competitive advantage

How reducing developer friction at scale boosts velocity, quality, and retention, and becomes a real competitive edge in the AI era.

+ More

Talk

Engineering at scale: Why developer experience is your competitive advantage

16:40 – 17:05

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Engineering friction compounds across your organization, costing you velocity, quality, and talent. This talk provides a data-driven framework for measuring, prioritizing, and scaling DevEx improvements that deliver measurable business impact.

Your engineers spend hours waiting on builds, navigating undocumented systems, and context-switching between 12 different tools. That’s not just frustrating—it’s expensive. Every friction point compounds across your organization, costing you velocity, quality, and your ability to retain top talent.

As AI transforms software development, this problem is about to get worse. AI-generated code increases deployment frequency and system complexity. If your baseline friction is already high, AI won’t speed you up—it will amplify every bottleneck and create new categories of problems you haven’t seen yet.

This talk presents a systematic framework for identifying and eliminating engineering friction at scale. You’ll learn how to measure what’s actually slowing your teams down, build data-driven business cases for DevEx investment, and prioritize changes that deliver measurable ROI. We’ll cover how to scale improvements from a single team to your entire engineering organization, and why the teams that fix their DevEx foundation now will outpace competitors in the AI era.

You’ll walk away with practical frameworks, measurement approaches, and stakeholder templates you can use immediately—whether you’re making the case for investment, leading an improvement initiative, or scaling best practices across teams.

Key takeaways

  • A measurement framework for quantifying engineering friction and connecting it to business outcomes (velocity, quality, retention)
  • Proven stakeholder templates for building data-driven business cases that secure DevEx investment
  • A scalable playbook for rolling out DevEx improvements from single teams to entire engineering organizations
  • FEATURING
    Nicole Forsgren
    Lead Author – "Frictionless" and "Accelerate"

    Dr. Nicole Forsgren is considered one of the most prominent and important minds in DevOps and developer productivity. She has led efforts to improve DevEx and AI-native developer productivity at some of the largest companies in the world. She is author of two best-selling, award-winning books: Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps, which netted a Shingo Publication Award, and The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability & Security in Technology Organizations, now in its second edition. Her latest book, Frictionless: 7 Steps to Remove Barriers, Unlock Value, and Outpace Your Competition in the AI Era was recently released. She is best known for her work measuring the technology process and as the lead investigator on the largest DevOps studies to date. She has been an entrepreneur, professor, developer, sysadmin, and performance engineer.

    Nicole’s work has been published in several peer-reviewed journals and conferences. Nicole earned her PhD in Management Information Systems and Masters in Accounting from the University of Arizona. She lives in the Southwest and recharges her brain with gym time, tacos, and Diet Coke.

    View Nicole’s profile

Talk

Staff+•Tech Lead

Platform engineering practices for speedy delivery

Practical platform practices that compound over time, helping teams ship faster, improve reliability, and make AI-assisted delivery actually work.

+ More

Talk

Platform engineering practices for speedy delivery

09:20 – 09:45

This session is suitable for:

Staff+ Tech Lead

What tools and techniques do top-performing teams incorporate into their software delivery practices in 2026? In this talk, you’ll learn about ways to improve your DORA metrics to become an elite-performing team that can effectively leverage AI-assisted development, and how benefits compound exponentially from adopting the interlocking modern developer productivity and platform engineering stack.

You’ll see concrete, vendor-agnostic examples of teams gaining confidence in their delivery process through hermetic build artifacts, continuous delivery pipelines, feature flagging, observability, code ownership, blameless incident analysis, shared platforms/infrastructure, Service Level Objectives (SLOs), and chaos engineering.

Key takeaways

  • How to build platform and structure platform teams
  • Which platform practices to embrace in which order
  • How AI changes (or doesn’t change) your dev workflows
  • FEATURING
    Liz Fong-Jones
    Technical FellowHoneycomb

    Liz is a developer advocate, labor and ethics organizer, and Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) with over two decades of experience. She is currently a Technical Fellow at honeycomb.io, and previously was an SRE working on products ranging from the Google Cloud Load Balancer to Google Flights.

    She lives in Vancouver, BC with her wife Elly and partners, and in Sydney, NSW. She plays classical piano, leads an EVE Online alliance, and advocates for transgender rights.

    View Liz’s profile

Morning Break

Talk

Experienced Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

Moving accessibility from debt to done at giffgaff

How accessibility became part of everyday engineering, improving inclusion and business impact without slowing delivery.

+ More

Talk

Moving accessibility from debt to done at giffgaff

12:50 – 13:15

This session is suitable for:

Experienced Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Accessibility is often seen as a velocity killer. I’ll share how giffgaff transformed our legacy monolith. We proved inclusive code costs zero extra time and unlocks the massive economic potential of the ‘Purple Pound’.

Accessibility is often treated as a compliance checkbox or a final cleanup phase. It becomes a form of exclusionary tech debt that teams fear. With the ‘Purple Pound’ (the spending power of disabled households) worth an estimated £274 billion in the UK alone, the business case is clear. Yet at giffgaff, we faced a hard reality with our legacy monolith. We had a daunting backlog, and it was feared that fixing it would destroy productivity and derail our roadmap.

In this talk, I’ll share how we turned this challenge into an opportunity to build a high-performing, inclusive engineering culture. We moved beyond reactive bug fixes to prove a controversial truth. Writing accessible code doesn’t have to take extra time.

I will demonstrate how we built an accessibility-first mindset by:

  • Modernising the monolith and securing leadership buy-in by coupling accessibility standards with our technical migration to a modern tech stack.
  • Scaling knowledge through documentation and training to empower developers, rather than relying on experts.
  • Building culture by establishing an Employee Resource Group and hosting an ‘Accessibility Culture Day’ to shift our perspective from obligation to opportunity.
  • Moving from a fix-it-later approach to an accessibility-first mindset, proven by a drop from 43 accessibility issues to zero in our new phones journey, without delaying release.

This talk is for leaders looking to move accessibility from the backlog to the definition of done, proving that quality, inclusion, and speed are not trade-offs.

Key takeaways

  • Learn how to pay down accessibility debt by aligning it with technical modernisation.
  • Discover how to quantify the impact of inclusion to secure leadership buy-in.
  • Understand how to scale accessibility knowledge via documentation and tooling.
  • Gain strategies to build a culture of empathy that shifts the mindset from compliance to opportunity.
  • FEATURING
    Abi Harrison-Nye
    Software Engineergiffgaff

    Abi is a Software Engineer in the Future Capabilities team and Lead for the Accessibility and Neurodiversity ERG at giffgaff, driving technical and cultural transformation. She moves beyond code to champion inclusive engineering, leading strategies that shift accessibility from a backlog burden to a core engineering value. Through internal advocacy and scalable training programmes, she equips leaders and teams with the tools to build a truly accessible web.

    View Abi’s profile

Talk

Staff+•Tech Lead

Finding the 80/20: Lessons from delivering our first LLM feature

How to choose what actually matters when shipping your first LLM feature, balancing evaluation, trust, and delivery without overengineering.

+ More

Talk

Finding the 80/20: Lessons from delivering our first LLM feature

10:05 – 10:30

This session is suitable for:

Staff+ Tech Lead

Shipping your first LLM feature requires more than code. This talk explains how we navigated new strategic demands, from opt-in stances to evaluation workflows, to find a pragmatic path to production.

Even for mature engineering organisations, the first LLM-powered feature introduces a paradigm shift. The actual coding often feels like the easy part. The real challenge lies in a daunting list of new “supporting” activities. From defining evaluation frameworks and prompt versioning to deciding on customer “opt-out” stances and communication strategies, how do you decide where to focus your limited energy?

In this session, I will share the “battle scars” from our journey to production. I’ll break down our approach to the 80/20 rule: identifying the activities that required deep investment, those we found a “light” way to handle, and those we intentionally parked for later.

We will explore:

  • The Effort Flip: How we restructured our workflow to move from “getting it to work” to “ensuring it’s good enough,” reallocating engineering time from writing code to context engineering and evaluation.
  • Strategic Stances: How we tackled non-code needs like opt-in/opt-out policies, customer FAQs, and internal upskilling.
  • Triage in Action: What we over-invested in, what I wish we’d done sooner (like early internal documentation on feature capabilities) and what we successfully deferred (like automation of evals).

This isn’t a prescriptive guide, but a look behind the curtain at how we defined our own “production-ready” standard. You will leave with a framework for auditing your own AI roadmap to ensure you’re focused on the activities that truly drive reliability and trust.

Key takeaways

  • Evaluation First: Robust evaluation matters more for reliable AI systems than perfecting the initial code.
  • Prioritising based on a North Star: We treated security and trust as non-negotiables, informing what to prioritise, including OWASP Top 10 reviews and data privacy decisions.
  • Design the First Feature to Scale: The initial rollout can establish reusable patterns that accelerate every AI feature that follows.
  • Manual Before Automated: Starting with human-in-the-loop evaluation saved time and helped us understand failure modes before investing in automated testing.
  • FEATURING
    Thordis Thorsteins
    Lead AI Data ScientistPanaseer

    Thordis Thorsteins is a Lead AI Data Scientist at Panaseer. She works in cybersecurity and has defined the AI strategy of
    her company as well as led the work to develop the company’s first four production AI features. Her earlier background
    focused on mathematics. teaching and credit risk. She is interested in making the seemingly complicated understandable.

    View Thordis’s profile

Lunch Break

Talk

Staff+•Tech Lead

Taming the legacy system monster

Learn how to document, stabilize, and modernize legacy systems without risky rewrites or single-person dependencies.

+ More

Talk

Taming the legacy system monster

16:20 – 16:45

This session is suitable for:

Staff+ Tech Lead

Replace fragile legacy scripts with cloud-native stability by mastering documentation, phased delivery, and knowledge transfer to eliminate single points of failure in your architecture.

Moving legacy systems to the cloud is often sold as a solution, but a “lift-and-shift” without a longer-term plan only relocates the problem. When mission-critical architecture relies on decades of legacy Bash and PL/SQL scripts maintained by a single person, that individual becomes a single point of failure. Their departure doesn’t just leave a vacancy; it leaves a “black box” monster that no one understands and everyone is afraid to touch.

This platform-agnostic session provides a survival guide for inheriting these systems. We will explore why the foundation of modernization isn’t code, but documentation and knowledge gathering. We’ll discuss how to audit undocumented scripts to build a source of truth before a single line of code is rewritten.

A key focus will be practical application of the strangler fig pattern. Instead of a risky “big bang” rewrite, we examine how to balance ongoing maintenance of the old system with the development of the new. You will learn how to establish realistic dates and deliverables that prioritize stability—such as replacing outer Bash wrappers first while letting complex but stable PL/SQL logic run until a later phase. This talk provides a blueprint for turning a fragile, person-dependent script library into a resilient, documented, and modernisable cloud asset.

Key takeaways

  • Identify and mitigate “”Single Points of Failure”” by converting tribal knowledge into technical documentation
  • Develop a phased “”piecemeal”” migration roadmap that prioritizes wrapping scripts over deep logic
  • Balance the “”business as usual”” maintenance of legacy code with the development of new architecture
  • Establish a framework for setting realistic deliverables and milestones during a high-risk cloud transition
  • FEATURING
    Adam Harley
    Technical ArchitectThe University of Sheffield

    Adam is a Technical Architect at the University of Sheffield, having started out as a self-taught developer and embraced the rise of the cloud era in an institutional environment.

    View Adam’s profile

Afternoon Break

Talk

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager

How we introduced quality engineering and made everything better!

How modern quality engineering reduced deployment time dramatically while improving developer experience through iterative, sustainable change.

+ More

Talk

How we introduced quality engineering and made everything better!

14:35 – 15:00

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager

How modernising our quality practices created a cycle of continuous improvement, transforming tools, processes, and culture, and ultimately delivering organisational change that achieved what had previously been considered impossible.

This talk shares how we introduced modern quality engineering into a legacy environment and in doing so reduced our lead time to deployment by 480 hours while also dramatically improving the developer experience. We’ll break down the technical, cultural, and procedural shifts that enabled faster feedback loops, more reliable deployments, and higher team confidence. From early test-automation efforts and the introduction of ephemeral environments, to standardising deployments and gradually replacing brittle manual steps, this is a practical, honest account of how meaningful change actually happens. Attendees will leave with a clear understanding of what quality engineering really looks like in practice, how to introduce it sustainably, and what timescales to expect when pursuing long-term ROI and organisational transformation.

Here’s what we’ll cover:

Background

  • State of things when we started
  • Issues this caused

First steps

  • Introducing test automation to create faster feedback loops
  • How we prioritised out test creation and determined what was the most valuable.

Unlocking deployments

  • Introducing tooling and processes that standardised and automated deployments.
  • Enabled more people to be involved, understand, and contribute to improving our processes.

Shifting left

  • Improving development ways of working that enabled more testing, more often, and earlier in the process.
  • Introducing ephemeral test environments
  • What they are, how they work, and how they improved testing

Trust takes time

  • A pause in discussing the improvements to focus on why its importnant to iterate slowly over time and build confidence gradually when making significant changes to processes and ways of working

Replacing manual with automated

  • How automating those final manual steps allowed all the gradual improvements to come together

Summary

  • Where did we end up
  • What did we learn?
  • How long did it take?

Key takeaways

  • Explain what modern quality engineering looks like in practice, beyond traditional QA, and identify where to start in their own teams.
  • Prioritise the right early investments (automation, feedback loops, workflow changes) to generate momentum and visible value.
  • Design sustainable improvements using iterative change, gradual trust-building, and appropriate timescales for organisational ROI.
  • Apply practical techniques for introducing test automation, standardising deployments, and using ephemeral environments to accelerate delivery.
  • Recognise the cultural, technical, and process shifts needed to reduce lead time and improve developer experience across an organisation.
  • FEATURING
    Stuart Thomas
    Head of QualityHumara

    Stuart Thomas is an engineering leader passionate about modernising software delivery and building high-performing teams. He specialises in quality engineering, test automation, and creating sustainable processes that improve developer experience. Combining technical expertise with practical leadership, Stuart helps organisations transform culture and ways of working. He enjoys sharing real-world lessons from engineering transformations, inspiring and equipping other leaders to drive meaningful change in their teams and organisations, and mentoring others to build more effective, collaborative, and quality-focused engineering practices.

    View Stuart’s profile

Talk

Director+•Experienced Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

Building resilient engineering teams when failure is the default

How teams operating under constant failure build resilient systems and cultures by assuming outages are normal, not exceptional.

+ More

Talk

Building resilient engineering teams when failure is the default

15:35 – 16:00

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

In established ecosystems, “Chaos Engineering” is a simulation. In Nigeria, it is a daily reality. Learn the “Zero-Trust” patterns and leadership strategies we use to build bulletproof systems when the infrastructure is constantly failing us.

In established ecosystems, engineering leaders obsess over “Chaos Monkey”, software designed to randomly crash servers to test resilience. In Abuja Nigeria, we don’t need Chaos Monkey. We operate on a national power grid that collapsed over 20 times in the last two years, amidst hundreds of fiber cuts and network disruptions.

For my team, failure isn’t a theoretical risk to be simulated; it is the default state of our existence.

This session explores the unique engineering discipline required to build world-class products in a “low-trust” infrastructure environment. I will share the war story of a Black Friday launch for our high-volume fintech platform where we faced the “Perfect Storm”: a major fiber cut took our office offline, our primary payment partner suffered a latency spike, and the power grid collapsed, all within an hour.

Most teams would have folded. Mine didn’t even pause.

I will detail the “Zero-Trust” framework that allowed us to survive, and how you can apply it to your own stack:

  1. The Architecture of Distrust: How we moved from synchronous coupling to an aggressive asynchronous model. We assume every external API (Stripe, Twilio, AWS) will fail 50% of the time. I will show how we used Redis-backed persistent queues and the Outbox Pattern to allow our app to “hold its breath” for hours without crashing.
  2. The “Air-Gapped” Developer: How we built “Offline-First” dev environments. By dockerizing our entire stack locally (including mocked third-party services), we empowered engineers to ship code even while tethered to 3G mobile hotspots, a lesson in eliminating cloud dependencies that speeds up any team.
  3. Leading Through “Outage Fatigue”: Constant firefighting burns out engineers. I will share my playbook for psychological safety, shifting the culture from “Who broke it?” to “How did the system absorb the shock?”

Attendees will leave with a new perspective: You don’t need to be in Africa to face failure. By applying these “survivalist” constraints, you can build systems that are bulletproof anywhere.

Key takeaways

  1. Organic Chaos Engineering: Why “simulated” failure pales in comparison to real-world constraints, and how to audit your system for “happy path” bias.
  2. Asynchronous by Default: Implementing specific patterns (Circuit Breakers, Leaky Buckets, Outbox) to decouple uptime from third-party dependencies.
  3. Psychological Safety in a Firefight: A manager’s guide to preventing burnout when the environment is constantly fighting against you.
  • FEATURING
    King-Immanuel Edoh
    Senior Product & Engineering LeadDigital Planet X & Code Campus

    King-Immanuel Edoh is a senior product and engineering lead with experience building and scaling software products across startups, agencies, and developer education platforms. He works with Code Campus and also leads Digital Planet X, where he partners with companies to deliver pragmatic, production-ready solutions under real-world constraints. His work focuses on making sound technical and product decisions in environments where reliability, cost, and team capacity matter more than hype. Drawing from hands-on experience across emerging markets and global teams, King-Immanuel brings a grounded perspective on leadership, trade-offs, and sustainable engineering practices.

    View King-Immanuel’s profile

Talk

Director+•Experienced Manager•Staff+

AI in the trenches: Real-world wins without breaking things

How to integrate AI into real engineering workflows to boost delivery speed while keeping systems stable and teams confident.

+ More

Talk

AI in the trenches: Real-world wins without breaking things

12:40 – 13:05

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager Staff+

Discover how the biggest e-commerce company in Turkey, used LLMs and automation workflows to boost engineering speed by 30%–improving tests, documentation, and delivery, while keeping production stable, developers confident, and AI adoption practical, measurable.

Every engineering leader wants AI-driven productivity–but few achieve it without chaos. In this talk, I’ll share how our teams integrated LLMs and automation tools like n8n, Cursor, A2A, and MCPs into a 2,000-engineer organization to deliver a 30% improvement in delivery speed while keeping production stable.

This isn’t a story about hype or magic prompts–it’s about engineering discipline, governance, and workflow design. You’ll see how we automated testing, documentation, and code reviews; built smart pipelines; and measured impact in ways that developers trusted. I’ll also share what didn’t work–over-automation, misaligned incentives, and cultural resistance–and how we overcame them.

Attendees will leave with practical strategies to safely scale AI adoption, boost team productivity, and blend human creativity with machine efficiency–all without breaking the systems or the culture that make great engineering teams thrive.

Key takeaways

Whether you’re AI-curious or already experimenting, you’ll leave with a playbook for:

  • Learn how to integrate LLMs and automation without disrupting production stability.
  • Discover practical methods to boost engineering productivity by 30%.
  • See real examples of AI-driven testing, documentation, and code reviews.
  • Understand how to build trust and governance for safe AI adoption.
  • Take home a proven framework for scaling AI across large engineering teams.
  • FEATURING
    Yiğit Darçın
    Director of EngineeringTrendyol

    Yiğit Darçın is a Director of Engineering at Trendyol, the largest e-commerce company in the region, where he leads data, ml and core technology teams of over 750 engineers. With more than 20 years of experience in scaling products and organizations, he focuses on building high-impact teams, engineering culture, and AI-driven productivity. Yiğit has co-founded and exited two startups and is passionate about combining innovation, automation, and leadership to deliver real business value.

    View Yiğit’s profile

Talk

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

End of day wrap-up

Host’s closing remarks.

+ More

Talk

End of day wrap-up

17:50 – 17:55

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Host’s closing remarks.

  • FEATURING
    Sarah Wells
    Independent Technical Consultant & Author

    Sarah is a technology leader, consultant and conference speaker with a focus on engineering effectiveness, microservices, incident management, platform engineering, optimising for flow and technical strategy. She has over 20 years’ experience as a developer, principal engineer and tech director across product, platform, SRE and DevOps teams.

    She spent over a decade working at the Financial Times, as it transformed from 12 releases a year to more than 20,000, embracing autonomous empowered teams and adopting microservices, DevOps, containers and platform engineering.

    She is the author of the O’Reilly book Enabling Microservice Success: Managing Technical, Organizational and Cultural Challenges.

    View Sarah’s profile

Networking Mixer

DirectorPlus zone

DirectorPlus Roundtable

Director+

Delivering more with fewer resources: How to maintain impact under tighter constraints

Practical strategies for engineering leaders to prioritize ruthlessly, remove low-value work, and sustain team performance despite growing expectations and tighter resources.

+ More

DirectorPlus Roundtable

Delivering more with fewer resources: How to maintain impact under tighter constraints

11:05 – 12:00

This session is suitable for:

Director+

A roundtable on how engineering leaders maintain delivery, quality, and team health when resources are limited and expectations continue to grow.

Discussion includes:

  • How to prioritise work when teams cannot do everything the business asks for
  • How to identify and eliminate work that doesn’t create meaningful impact
  • How to balance delivery pressure with maintaining sustainable team health
  • How to help teams focus on the highest-value work when resources are constrained
  • FEATURING
    James Da Costa
    VP of Engineering at Cint

    James Da Costa is VP of Engineering at Cint where he leads teams building services which connect researchers with respondents at scale. He is passionate about coaching managers, building collaborative teams and creating delightful products.

    James has over 20 years of experience in tech and has worked in UI design, frontend and backend technologies.

    Outside of work, he loves competitive sports, a good mystery novel and listening to his favourite podcast (You Are Not So Smart).

    View James ‘s profile

DirectorPlus Roundtable

Director+

From strategy to execution: Aligning teams around priorities

Turn strategic goals into clear priorities by aligning teams, defining success metrics, and adapting plans while staying focused on outcomes.

+ More

DirectorPlus Roundtable

From strategy to execution: Aligning teams around priorities

11:05 – 12:00

This session is suitable for:

Director+

A roundtable on translating strategic goals into clear priorities and delivery outcomes.

Discussion includes:

  • Creating alignment across multiple teams and stakeholders
  • Setting clear success metrics and accountability
  • Adjusting plans without losing focus on strategic outcomes
  • FEATURING
    Dan Blundell
    Engineering DirectorGymshark

    Dan is an engineering leader and builder of technical teams. He aims to create environments where each person feels valued, supported and can learn continuously, together. At Gymshark, Dan heads up Core Engineering and is responsible for data pipelines, API and integration development and platform reliability engineering.

    Dan will forever be a student of leadership, values feedback above almost anything else and would love to hear how best to help you. His latest side project is taming the tantrums of two toddlers and aims to coach them in the ways of empathy, responsibility and being a good human. Dan will eventually write a book but for now, tweets irregularly at @danblundell and posts sporadically at danblundell.com

    View Dan’s profile

DirectorPlus Roundtable

Director+

Performance, calibration and compensation: Creating fair and effective systems

Design fair performance and compensation systems that motivate teams, align goals with business outcomes, and retain high performing engineers.

+ More

DirectorPlus Roundtable

Performance, calibration and compensation: Creating fair and effective systems

11:05 – 12:00

This session is suitable for:

Director+

A roundtable on designing performance systems that motivate teams, support growth and retain top performers.

Discussion includes:

  • Defining clear performance expectations and metrics across teams and roles
  • Aligning individual goals with organisational priorities and business outcomes
  • Running effective calibration processes that balance fairness, transparency and leadership judgement
  • Using performance and compensation frameworks to retain and grow high-performing engineers
  • FEATURING
    JooBee Yeow
    Adviser to FoundersLearngility

    JooBee Yeow is a business strategist, systems thinker and start-up scaling architect. A trained Systems Engineer with a PhD in Leadership Development, she operates at the intersection of people, strategy and business as a Chief People Officer.

    With experience spanning 2-, 20-, and 200-year-old companies and revenues from £10M to £1B, she helps founders transition from ‘STARTing to Build’ to ‘BUILDing to Scale’—designing scalable operating systems that fuel start-up growth.

    JooBee is the creator of the Scaling Start-Ups Blog & Newsletter and a trusted voice in the start-up ecosystem, contributing insights to Sifted, Notion Capital, Atomico, Balderton, Forestay and beyond.

    View JooBee’s profile

DirectorPlus Roundtable

Director+

Making your engineering strategy legible to the business

Learn how engineering leaders translate technical strategy into clear business value, gaining executive alignment and support for long-term investments.

+ More

DirectorPlus Roundtable

Making your engineering strategy legible to the business

11:05 – 12:00

This session is suitable for:

Director+

A roundtable on communicating engineering strategy so executives understand and support technical investments.

Discussion includes:

  • Translating engineering priorities into business outcomes and risk
  • Building alignment across product, finance and executive leadership
  • Securing support for long-term engineering initiatives
  • FEATURING
    Anna Shipman
    CTOKooth Digital Health

    Anna Shipman is the CTO at Kooth Digital Health, former Technical Director at the Financial Times, and an accomplished author.

    View Anna ‘s profile

DirectorPlus Roundtable

Director+

Understanding production systems: Observability for modern engineering organisations

How engineering teams use observability to understand complex systems, investigate incidents faster, and improve reliability in distributed architectures.

+ More

DirectorPlus Roundtable

Understanding production systems: Observability for modern engineering organisations

11:05 – 12:00

This session is suitable for:

Director+

Sponsored by

Honeycomb Logo - LeadDev

A roundtable on how engineering leaders improve visibility into complex systems and make faster, more confident decisions during incidents.

Discussion includes:

  • Moving from monitoring dashboards to deeper observability practices
  • Helping engineers investigate and understand complex system behaviour
  • Enabling teams to debug issues quickly in distributed architectures

DirectorPlus Roundtable

Director+

Platform engineering: How to build platforms that enable teams without becoming a bottleneck

How engineering leaders design platform teams that accelerate product delivery, maintain team autonomy, and avoid becoming organizational bottlenecks.

+ More

DirectorPlus Roundtable

Platform engineering: How to build platforms that enable teams without becoming a bottleneck

11:05 – 12:00

This session is suitable for:

Director+

Sponsored by

Harness LeadDev

A roundtable on how engineering leaders design platform teams that create leverage across the organisation while keeping product teams fast and autonomous.

Discussion includes:

  • How to decide when a platform team is needed and what it should own
  • How to define clear boundaries between platform teams and product teams
  • How to prevent platform teams from becoming delivery bottlenecks
  • How to measure whether platform investments are actually improving productivity and delivery

DirectorPlus Workshop

Director+

Design and deliver an effective engineering strategy

Learn how to design an executable engineering strategy that aligns technology, organization, and culture with real business goals.

+ More

DirectorPlus Workshop

Design and deliver an effective engineering strategy

11:05 – 12:45

This session is suitable for:

Director+

An effective engineering strategy is not just about technology choices. It’s about processes, organisational design, and culture. Good strategy has clarity and, more importantly, is successful because it can be executed. This workshop will equip you with the skills to evaluate and develop a successful technical strategy for your organization.

This session will provide you with:

  • The skills to understand what makes a good technical strategy and what makes a bad one
  • An understanding of how to align your technical efforts with your business’s organizational goals
  • The tools to build, articulate, and communicate a fully realized tech strategy
  • Tips on how to adjust your strategy to a shifting market
  • FEATURING
    Alice Bartlett
    Head of EngineeringRightmove

    Alice Bartlett is a Head of Engineering at Rightmove. She has led technology strategy and delivery at scale, including content architecture and AI-driven product programmes at the Financial Times, and co-developed the FT’s 10-year sustainability strategy as part of its Next Generation Board.

    View Alice’s profile

DirectorPlus Roundtable

Director+

Measuring engineering impact: Metrics that actually drive improvement

Define meaningful engineering metrics that improve productivity, quality, and delivery while clearly communicating performance and outcomes to executives and boards.

+ More

DirectorPlus Roundtable

Measuring engineering impact: Metrics that actually drive improvement

12:35 – 13:30

This session is suitable for:

Director+

A roundtable on defining meaningful metrics for productivity, quality and delivery.

Discussion includes:

  • Identifying metrics that reflect real engineering outcomes
  • Measuring the impact of AI tools and automation on productivity
  • Reporting effectively on engineering performance to executives and boards

DirectorPlus Roundtable

Director+

Designing organizations that scale: Teams, ownership and boundaries

Discuss how to design scalable engineering organizations by defining team ownership, architectural boundaries, and structures that support autonomy and alignment.

+ More

DirectorPlus Roundtable

Designing organizations that scale: Teams, ownership and boundaries

12:35 – 13:30

This session is suitable for:

Director+

A roundtable on structuring engineering organisations to support autonomy, alignment and growth.

Discussion includes:

  • Defining team ownership and architectural boundaries
  • Avoiding coordination overload as organisations grow
  • Evolving team structures as systems and products scale
  • FEATURING
    Oge Opara-Nadi
    VP of EngineeringHey Savi

    Oge is VP of Engineering at Hey Savi, a fashion tech startup revolutionising how women search and shop online through AI-driven innovation. She leads the engineering team, driving rapid product development while championing equity, diversity and inclusion in the tech industry.

    An experienced public speaker, Oge regularly shares insights on leadership, engineering excellence, building diverse teams and fostering inclusive cultures that empower innovation and growth.

    View profile

DirectorPlus Roundtable

Director+

Becoming a trusted executive partner: Growing your influence beyond engineering

Build credibility with executive peers by communicating engineering priorities through business outcomes, influencing strategy, and strengthening relationships across senior leadership.

+ More

DirectorPlus Roundtable

Becoming a trusted executive partner: Growing your influence beyond engineering

12:35 – 13:30

This session is suitable for:

Director+

A roundtable on managing the risks and responsibilities of adopting AI across engineering teams.

Discussion includes:

  • Establishing policies and guardrails for AI usage across the organisation
  • Managing risks related to security, data privacy and hallucinations
  • Aligning engineering, legal and security teams on responsible AI adoption
  • FEATURING
    Randy Shoup
    SVP EngineeringThrive Market

    Randy Shoup serves as SVP of Engineering at Thrive Market. With more than 30 years of experience building distributed systems and leading high-performing teams, he has held senior technology leadership roles at eBay, Google, Stitch Fix, and WeWork. He also mentors CTOs, advises organizations, and shares his perspectives widely. A frequent conference speaker on software and engineering leadership, he is particularly interested in how culture, technology, and organizational design intersect.

    View Randy’s profile

DirectorPlus Roundtable

Director+

Incident management at scale: Coordinating teams during major outages

Strategies for coordinating teams, communication, and decision-making during large-scale engineering incidents.

+ More

DirectorPlus Roundtable

Incident management at scale: Coordinating teams during major outages

12:35 – 13:30

This session is suitable for:

Director+

Sponsored by

incident.io

A roundtable on managing large-scale incidents that impact multiple teams and systems.

Discussion includes:

  • Coordinating response across teams during major incidents
  • Managing communication with leadership and stakeholders
  • Maintaining focus and clarity in complex incident scenarios

DirectorPlus Roundtable

Director+

Progressive delivery in practice: Shipping faster without breaking things

Practical approaches to progressive delivery, enabling teams to release more frequently, reduce deployment risk, and recover quickly from failures.

+ More

DirectorPlus Roundtable

Progressive delivery in practice: Shipping faster without breaking things

12:35 – 13:30

This session is suitable for:

Director+

Sponsored by

Octopus Deploy LeadDev

A roundtable on how engineering teams adopt safer release strategies to support faster product delivery.

Discussion includes:

  • Introducing progressive rollout strategies across teams
  • Reducing the impact of failed releases
  • Building confidence in frequent deployments

DirectorPlus Roundtable

Director+

AI and the software development lifecycle: what will change and what will stay the same?

Exploring how AI tools and evolving skill requirements are reshaping engineering careers, hiring practices, and growth paths for the next generation.

+ More

DirectorPlus Roundtable

AI and the software development lifecycle: what will change and what will stay the same?

14:05 – 15:00

This session is suitable for:

Director+

A roundtable on how AI is reshaping and reinventing the software development process, and what it means for individual developers, teams, and leadership.

Discussion includes:

  • What are the steps between traditional and AI-native approaches to software development, and when should we take those steps?
  • How does the developer role change, and how will developers learn and improve as they write less code?
  • How can we prepare our teams and organisations now?

  • FEATURING
    Hywel Carver
    CTO-turned-FounderSkiller Whale

    Hywel wrote his first program in C aged 9. After graduating with an MEng from Cambridge, he dropped out of his PhD programme to co-found his first start-up. Today, Hywel is Skiller Whale’s Co-Founder and CEO. He runs a dinner club for CTOs, a podcast for tech leaders called ‘Primarily Context-Based’, and is designing and building his own 8-bit computer for playing Pong. In his 12+ year career, he’s been building and scaling start-ups. With Skiller Whale, he is drawing on that experience to solve the biggest problem he faced as a CTO: learning for engineering teams.

    View Hywel’s profile

DirectorPlus Roundtable

Director+

Growing senior engineers: Supporting technical progression beyond management

Explore how to grow senior and staff engineers through clear career paths, strong technical leadership opportunities, and environments that support meaningful impact.

+ More

DirectorPlus Roundtable

Growing senior engineers: Supporting technical progression beyond management

14:05 – 15:00

This session is suitable for:

Director+

A roundtable on how organisations develop strong technical leaders without pushing engineers into management roles.

Discussion includes:

  • Designing career paths for senior and staff engineers
  • Supporting technical leadership across teams
  • Creating environments where senior engineers can grow and have impact

DirectorPlus Roundtable

Director+

Managing managers when everything is changing

Supporting and developing managers through organizational change, balancing autonomy, feedback, and stability as expectations and structures continue to evolve.

+ More

DirectorPlus Roundtable

Managing managers when everything is changing

14:05 – 15:00

This session is suitable for:

Director+

A roundtable on navigating the challenges of managing managers as organisations evolve. As structures flatten and expectations grow, leaders must rethink how they support, develop, and guide their management layer.

Discussion includes:

  • Giving a manager the feedback and support they need when they’re struggling but not failing — and when to call it
  • Managing your managers through upheaval — when they need to stay steady for their teams while you’re figuring it out yourself
  • Building managers who can operate with more autonomy as organizations flatten
  • FEATURING
    Suzan Bond
    Founder & CEOConstellary

    Suzan Bond is the founder and CEO of Constellary. With nearly two decades in tech, Suzan has worked with hundreds of engineering leaders and leadership teams to help them navigate change and meet the challenges of organizational leadership. Her work these days includes preparing new directors for the role, coaching senior engineering leaders and creating cohesive leadership teams.

    View Suzan’s profile

DirectorPlus Roundtable

Director+

Operational readiness: Preparing teams for the incidents you hope never happen

Strengthening incident readiness through clear escalation paths, scalable on-call systems, and preparation that helps teams respond quickly under pressure.

+ More

DirectorPlus Roundtable

Operational readiness: Preparing teams for the incidents you hope never happen

14:05 – 15:00

This session is suitable for:

Director+

Sponsored by

PagerDuty

A roundtable on how engineering leaders ensure their organisations are prepared to respond effectively when critical incidents occur.

Discussion includes:

  • Assessing incident response readiness across teams and services
  • Designing escalation and on-call systems that scale with the organisation
  • Ensuring teams are equipped to respond quickly under pressure
  • FEATURING
    João Freitas
    General Manager & Engineering Site LeadPagerDuty

    João Freitas is General Manager and Engineering Site Lead at Pager Duty. João is the main representative of the office in Portugal and is responsible for its growth, expansion, and culture. 

    With more than 20 years of experience in Software Development, Machine Learning, and as a People Manager, he was previously CTO at a startup in the area of Artificial Intelligence and has taken several roles at Microsoft in the areas of Speech Technologies and Big Data. 

    João also holds a PhD in speech technology and human-computer interaction, filed several patents, and published over 40 articles in peer-reviewed international conferences and journals. He is also the author and co-author of book chapters and one book.

    View João’s profile

DirectorPlus Roundtable

Director+

Balancing innovation and security in fast-growing engineering organisations

Balancing security and delivery in fast-growing engineering teams while aligning risk management with product goals and developer ownership.

+ More

DirectorPlus Roundtable

Balancing innovation and security in fast-growing engineering organisations

14:05 – 15:00

This session is suitable for:

Director+

Sponsored by

Span LeadDev

A roundtable on how leaders maintain strong security practices without slowing delivery.

Discussion includes:

  • Aligning security priorities with business and product goals
  • Managing security risk in fast-moving engineering environments
  • Building a culture where engineers take ownership of security

DirectorPlus Roundtable

Director+

Adopting AI in real systems: Moving from experimentation to organisational capability

Moving AI from experiments to real organisational capability by integrating tools into existing systems, workflows, and everyday engineering practices.

+ More

DirectorPlus Roundtable

Adopting AI in real systems: Moving from experimentation to organisational capability

15:35 – 16:30

This session is suitable for:

Director+

A roundtable on introducing AI tools and workflows into existing engineering systems and teams.

Discussion includes:

  • Identifying high-leverage AI use cases across the development lifecycle
  • Integrating AI into existing (“brownfield”) systems and workflows
  • Setting realistic expectations for productivity gains and organisational change

DirectorPlus Roundtable

Director+

Delivering more with fewer resources: How to maintain impact under tighter constraints

Practical strategies for engineering leaders to prioritize ruthlessly, remove low-value work, and sustain team performance despite growing expectations and tighter resources.

+ More

DirectorPlus Roundtable

Delivering more with fewer resources: How to maintain impact under tighter constraints

15:35 – 16:30

This session is suitable for:

Director+

A roundtable on how engineering leaders maintain delivery, quality, and team health when resources are limited and expectations continue to grow.

Discussion includes:

  • How to prioritise work when teams cannot do everything the business asks for
  • How to identify and eliminate work that doesn’t create meaningful impact
  • How to balance delivery pressure with maintaining sustainable team health
  • How to help teams focus on the highest-value work when resources are constrained
  • FEATURING
    James Da Costa
    VP of Engineering at Cint

    James Da Costa is VP of Engineering at Cint where he leads teams building services which connect researchers with respondents at scale. He is passionate about coaching managers, building collaborative teams and creating delightful products.

    James has over 20 years of experience in tech and has worked in UI design, frontend and backend technologies.

    Outside of work, he loves competitive sports, a good mystery novel and listening to his favourite podcast (You Are Not So Smart).

    View James ‘s profile

DirectorPlus Roundtable

Director+

From strategy to execution: Aligning teams around priorities

Turn strategic goals into clear priorities by aligning teams, defining success metrics, and adapting plans while staying focused on outcomes.

+ More

DirectorPlus Roundtable

From strategy to execution: Aligning teams around priorities

15:35 – 16:30

This session is suitable for:

Director+

A roundtable on translating strategic goals into clear priorities and delivery outcomes.

Discussion includes:

  • Creating alignment across multiple teams and stakeholders
  • Setting clear success metrics and accountability
  • Adjusting plans without losing focus on strategic outcomes
  • FEATURING
    Dan Blundell
    Engineering DirectorGymshark

    Dan is an engineering leader and builder of technical teams. He aims to create environments where each person feels valued, supported and can learn continuously, together. At Gymshark, Dan heads up Core Engineering and is responsible for data pipelines, API and integration development and platform reliability engineering.

    Dan will forever be a student of leadership, values feedback above almost anything else and would love to hear how best to help you. His latest side project is taming the tantrums of two toddlers and aims to coach them in the ways of empathy, responsibility and being a good human. Dan will eventually write a book but for now, tweets irregularly at @danblundell and posts sporadically at danblundell.com

    View Dan’s profile

DirectorPlus Roundtable

Director+

AI-assisted code quality: What engineering leaders should actually adopt

Exploring where AI meaningfully improves code quality, testing, and development workflows without disrupting how engineering teams already work.

+ More

DirectorPlus Roundtable

AI-assisted code quality: What engineering leaders should actually adopt

15:35 – 16:30

This session is suitable for:

Director+

Sponsored by

Qodo LeadDev

A roundtable on how AI can meaningfully improve code quality and engineering workflows beyond coding assistants.

Discussion includes:

  • Identifying where AI can improve code quality and testing practices
  • Introducing AI tools without disrupting existing development workflows
  • Setting expectations for productivity and quality improvements

DirectorPlus Roundtable

Director+

Measuring developer productivity in the age of AI

Rethinking developer productivity as AI reshapes engineering work, focusing on meaningful signals that guide leadership decisions and investment.

+ More

DirectorPlus Roundtable

Measuring developer productivity in the age of AI

15:35 – 16:30

This session is suitable for:

Director+

Sponsored by

DX x LeadDev

A roundtable on how engineering leaders evaluate productivity and impact as AI tools change the way teams work.

Discussion includes:

  • Defining meaningful productivity signals beyond activity metrics
  • Evaluating the impact of AI tools on engineering workflows and delivery
  • Using productivity data to guide leadership decisions and investment

DirectorPlus Workshop

Director+

From reactivity to OOlly: Systems of organisational observability

Build systems that give leaders real visibility into their organisation, helping spot issues early and guide teams without constant firefighting.

  • Lena Reinhard
    Engineering Leader, Organizational Developer, Coach, Facilitator
+ More

DirectorPlus Workshop

From reactivity to OOlly: Systems of organisational observability

15:50 – 17:00

This session is suitable for:

Director+

You know it: Fire fighting, reacting, and chasing information aren’t how you should you spend your time. But doing so much of this is exactly what makes it even harder to get out of it.

So how can you shift gears? What systems can (should?) you put in place to get the visiblity you need to do your job well? How can you make sure you’re able to spot issues and course-correct early without micromanaging everyone and everything at all times?

From this session run by a seasoned senior leader, you’ll take away concrete ideas to start exactly where you and your org are at right now, improve your organisational observability, and get a kit to help you evolve from there.

  • FEATURING
    Lena Reinhard
    Engineering Leader, Organizational Developer, Coach, Facilitator

    Lena Reinhard is a seasoned technology leader, currently helping leaders and their teams succeed through her work as a leadership coach, organizational developer, and facilitator. Having served the majority of her 20-year career in leadership roles, such as VP Engineering with CircleCI, Travis CI, and a SaaS startup co-founder & CEO, she has partnered with a variety of remote, hybrid, and co-located companies at all stages, from startups, to scale-ups, corporations, and NGOs. Lena loves to paint, read, and ride her bike around the forests and lakes of her home, Berlin, in Germany. She hosts O’Reilly’s Tech Leadership Tuesday podcast.

    View Lena’s profile

DirectorPlus Roundtable

Director+

Performance, calibration and compensation: Creating fair and effective systems

Design fair performance and compensation systems that motivate teams, align goals with business outcomes, and retain high performing engineers.

+ More

DirectorPlus Roundtable

Performance, calibration and compensation: Creating fair and effective systems

17:05 – 18:00

This session is suitable for:

Director+

A roundtable on designing performance systems that motivate teams, support growth and retain top performers.

Discussion includes:

  • Defining clear performance expectations and metrics across teams and roles
  • Aligning individual goals with organisational priorities and business outcomes
  • Running effective calibration processes that balance fairness, transparency and leadership judgement
  • Using performance and compensation frameworks to retain and grow high-performing engineers
  • FEATURING
    JooBee Yeow
    Adviser to FoundersLearngility

    JooBee Yeow is a business strategist, systems thinker and start-up scaling architect. A trained Systems Engineer with a PhD in Leadership Development, she operates at the intersection of people, strategy and business as a Chief People Officer.

    With experience spanning 2-, 20-, and 200-year-old companies and revenues from £10M to £1B, she helps founders transition from ‘STARTing to Build’ to ‘BUILDing to Scale’—designing scalable operating systems that fuel start-up growth.

    JooBee is the creator of the Scaling Start-Ups Blog & Newsletter and a trusted voice in the start-up ecosystem, contributing insights to Sifted, Notion Capital, Atomico, Balderton, Forestay and beyond.

    View JooBee’s profile

DirectorPlus Roundtable

Director+

Measuring engineering impact: Metrics that actually drive improvement

Define meaningful engineering metrics that improve productivity, quality, and delivery while clearly communicating performance and outcomes to executives and boards.

+ More

DirectorPlus Roundtable

Measuring engineering impact: Metrics that actually drive improvement

17:05 – 18:00

This session is suitable for:

Director+

A roundtable on defining meaningful metrics for productivity, quality and delivery.

Discussion includes:

  • Identifying metrics that reflect real engineering outcomes
  • Measuring the impact of AI tools and automation on productivity
  • Reporting effectively on engineering performance to executives and boards

DirectorPlus Roundtable

Director+

Designing organizations that scale: Teams, ownership and boundaries

Discuss how to design scalable engineering organizations by defining team ownership, architectural boundaries, and structures that support autonomy and alignment.

+ More

DirectorPlus Roundtable

Designing organizations that scale: Teams, ownership and boundaries

17:05 – 18:00

This session is suitable for:

Director+

A roundtable on structuring engineering organisations to support autonomy, alignment and growth.

Discussion includes:

  • Defining team ownership and architectural boundaries
  • Avoiding coordination overload as organisations grow
  • Evolving team structures as systems and products scale
  • FEATURING
    Oge Opara-Nadi
    VP of EngineeringHey Savi

    Oge is VP of Engineering at Hey Savi, a fashion tech startup revolutionising how women search and shop online through AI-driven innovation. She leads the engineering team, driving rapid product development while championing equity, diversity and inclusion in the tech industry.

    An experienced public speaker, Oge regularly shares insights on leadership, engineering excellence, building diverse teams and fostering inclusive cultures that empower innovation and growth.

    View profile

DirectorPlus Roundtable

Director+

Making your engineering strategy legible to the business

Learn how engineering leaders translate technical strategy into clear business value, gaining executive alignment and support for long-term investments.

+ More

DirectorPlus Roundtable

Making your engineering strategy legible to the business

17:05 – 18:00

This session is suitable for:

Director+

A roundtable on communicating engineering strategy so executives understand and support technical investments.

Discussion includes:

  • Translating engineering priorities into business outcomes and risk
  • Building alignment across product, finance and executive leadership
  • Securing support for long-term engineering initiatives
  • FEATURING
    Anna Shipman
    CTOKooth Digital Health

    Anna Shipman is the CTO at Kooth Digital Health, former Technical Director at the Financial Times, and an accomplished author.

    View Anna ‘s profile

DirectorPlus Roundtable

Director+

Becoming a trusted executive partner: Growing your influence beyond engineering

Build credibility with executive peers by communicating engineering priorities through business outcomes, influencing strategy, and strengthening relationships across senior leadership.

+ More

DirectorPlus Roundtable

Becoming a trusted executive partner: Growing your influence beyond engineering

17:05 – 18:00

This session is suitable for:

Director+

A roundtable on managing the risks and responsibilities of adopting AI across engineering teams.

Discussion includes:

  • Establishing policies and guardrails for AI usage across the organisation
  • Managing risks related to security, data privacy and hallucinations
  • Aligning engineering, legal and security teams on responsible AI adoption
  • FEATURING
    Randy Shoup
    SVP EngineeringThrive Market

    Randy Shoup serves as SVP of Engineering at Thrive Market. With more than 30 years of experience building distributed systems and leading high-performing teams, he has held senior technology leadership roles at eBay, Google, Stitch Fix, and WeWork. He also mentors CTOs, advises organizations, and shares his perspectives widely. A frequent conference speaker on software and engineering leadership, he is particularly interested in how culture, technology, and organizational design intersect.

    View Randy’s profile

DirectorPlus Mixer

Community Zone

Community Representation Groups

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

Connecting Black leaders

Connect with other leaders who have similar backgrounds and experiences to yours, and build a peer network for support throughout your leadership journey.

+ More

Community Representation Groups

Connecting Black leaders

10:35 – 11:00

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Connect with folks over shared experiences

Everyone’s journey into leadership is tough, but folks who are underrepresented in tech often face their own unique set of challenges. And that can lead to people feeling isolated in their experiences. 

Come to the community representation groups, where you’ll be able to connect with folks who might have similar backgrounds and experiences to yours, and where you’ll be able to build a peer network for support throughout your journey.

  • FEATURING
    Jessie Auguste
    Software EngineerCybSafe

    As an award-winning Software Engineer at CybSafe, Jessie drives secure software development practices while scaling engineering teams in the UK’s fast-paced startup ecosystem. Her technical expertise spans cybersecurity, application security, and building resilient systems that protect organisations from evolving threats.

    Beyond her engineering contributions, Jessie is a recognized leader in fostering inclusive tech cultures. She founded and hosts Glowing in Tech, a platform that has become a vital resource for tech leaders seeking to build more diverse and innovative teams. Through this work, she’s helped hundreds of underrepresented professionals advance their careers while providing actionable insights for leadership teams on creating inclusive environments that drive business results.

    As a sought-after technical speaker, Jessie has delivered keynotes and workshops at leading industry events including LeadDev, DevConf, React Miami, and BeJS, as well as for organizations like Docker and codebar. Her presentations focus on practical leadership strategies, secure coding practices, and building high-performing diverse teams.

    Jessie’s leadership extends to curriculum development, where she’s created and delivered specialised technical training programs, including OWASP secure coding principles courses. Her educational initiatives have equipped both individual contributors and engineering leaders with the skills needed to build secure, scalable systems while advancing DEI objectives.

    Through her board position with Girl Dreamer and active involvement with Coding Black Females, Jessie provides strategic guidance to organisations looking to transform their hiring, retention, and promotion practices in tech.

    View Jessie’s profile
  • Chinonso Ani
    Software EngineerNHS Benchmarking Network (The Benchmarking Network)

    Chinonso is a software engineering leader with over a decade of experience building scalable software systems, data pipelines, and cloud-native platforms across healthcare, e‑commerce, and SaaS products. He is a TOGAF certified Solution Architect and has led software engineering teams as an Engineering Manager and founder. He is also the LeadDev Meetup organiser in Manchester and LeadDev Community Organiser in London, he is passionate about AI-assisted development, integration patterns, and mentoring engineers in high-impact technical delivery.

    View Chinonso’s profile
  • Phillipa Rodney
    Engineering ManagerCrowdstrike

    Phillipa is an experienced engineering manager, passionate about people leadership and building great engineering cultures.

    Phillipa leads with empathy and trust; by demonstrating the importance of building relationships and coaching others to realise their full potential, she empowers engineers to bring their best selves to the workplace, promotes best practices and encourages excellence across teams to build the best products.

    View Phillipa’s profile

Table Talk

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

How do you balance strong security with an agentic experience?

Join facilitated conversations and dive into key issues facing engineering teams

+ More

Table Talk

How do you balance strong security with an agentic experience?

11:05 – 11:30

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Sponsored by

Frontegg LeadDev

Join facilitated conversations and dive into key issues facing engineering teams

There’s never a single silver bullet for any problem and often you’ll need to combine the ideas of multiple people to find the perfect solution for your team. We’ll be discussing some core issues in the Table Talk sessions, hosted by a group of engineering leaders who are on hand to provide their perspectives and help guide the conversation. You can dip in and out of discussions depending on what interests you the most.

  • FEATURING
    Bogdan Tsiganiuk
    Software DeveloperFrontegg

    Bogdan Tsiganiuk is a software engineer at Frontegg and previously worked as a backend engineer at ThriveDX Labs. He holds a degree in Applied Mathematics and Algorithms and is passionate about mathematics and machine learning.

    View Bogdan ‘s profile
  • Łukasz Lesiak
    Engineering ManagerIDEMIA Public Security

    Łukasz Lesiak is an Engineering Manager at IDEMIA Public Security.

    View Łukasz’s profile
  • JP Huynh
    Engineering ManagerSpendesk

    JP Huynh is an Engineering Manager at Spendesk who leads platform and infrastructure teams focused on helping product engineers move faster without sacrificing reliability.

    He has worked across open source companies, early-stage startups, and scale-ups where he spent much of his career building the systems and platforms that power modern engineering organisations.

    His work focuses on the intersection of cloud infrastructure, developer experience, and engineering leadership, helping teams scale both their systems and their impact.

    View JP’s profile

Table Talk

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

How do you measure and communicate software delivery in a way that resonates with leadership?

Join facilitated conversations and dive into key issues facing engineering teams

+ More

Table Talk

How do you measure and communicate software delivery in a way that resonates with leadership?

11:50 – 12:15

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Sponsored by

CircleCI Logo LeadDev

Join facilitated conversations and dive into key issues facing engineering teams

There’s never a single silver bullet for any problem and often you’ll need to combine the ideas of multiple people to find the perfect solution for your team. We’ll be discussing some core issues in the Table Talk sessions, hosted by a group of engineering leaders who are on hand to provide their perspectives and help guide the conversation. You can dip in and out of discussions depending on what interests you the most.

  • FEATURING
    Madhulika Mitra
    QA ManagerRuna.io

    Madhulika Mitra is a Software QA Manager with a passion for building smarter, more reliable testing systems. She specializes in modern test engineering using tools like Playwright, TypeScript, and AI-assisted workflows, and actively explores emerging practices such as LLM-driven testing and model-connected pipelines. Known for combining technical depth with thoughtful leadership, she focuses on improving engineering quality while mentoring teams and fostering empathetic feedback cultures. Madhulika also shares her insights through writing and experimentation, helping bridge the gap between traditional QA practices and the rapidly evolving world of AI-powered software development.

    View Madhulika’s profile
  • Abhi Thatte-Carrino
    Senior Engineering Manager Typeform

    Abhi is a Senior Engineering Manager with a proven track record of scaling high-performing engineering teams and driving technical excellence in fast-paced, high-growth environments. With over 14 years of experience in software engineering, she has built autonomous, motivated, and results-driven teams that thrive on ownership and innovation.

    At Typeform, Abhi oversees the core product and end-to-end customer journey that form the Create and Respond domains. Abhi leads cross-functional, multinational teams across Europe and the US.

    Prior to Typeform, Abhi led engineering teams at Matillion for Product-led Growth, Data Pipeline Designer, and Data Loader, while also driving initiatives in performance optimizations, incident management, security and engineering best practices. Her leadership ensured teams built scalable, maintainable, and high-performing software solutions.

    Beyond technology, Abhi is deeply passionate about mentoring future leaders, optimizing team dynamics, and fostering a culture of psychological safety and continuous growth. She believes in empowering engineers with the right tools, support, and environment to maximize both their impact and career growth.

    Abhi has two cats, Yuki and Winston, and lives 5 minutes from Wayne Manor. She also holds additional degrees in Indian classical music, and she appeared on Indian Pop Idol as a contestant.

    View Abhi’s profile
  • Olaf Molenveld
    Technology AdvisorCircleCI

    Olaf is a seasoned technology leader with over 25 years of experience in the software industry, excelling in both technical and leadership roles. He has a strong foundation in software development, architecture, and consulting, with a focus on aligning business challenges with cutting-edge technology solutions. As the founder and former CTO of Vamp.io, he played a key role in developing DevOps tools for containers, Kubernetes, and microservices. Following Vamp’s acquisition by CircleCI, Olaf now serves as a Technology Advisor, working closely with CTO Rob Zuber to advance CircleCI’s offerings. His expertise continues to drive technical innovation and excellence for the company and its customers.

    View Olaf’s profile

Industry Interest Groups

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

Connecting engineering leaders in banking and financial services

Connect with other leaders working in similar domains to share ideas, collaborate on challenges, and exchange solutions.

+ More

Industry Interest Groups

Connecting engineering leaders in banking and financial services

11:50 – 12:15

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Connect with folks over shared experiences

Building great software comes with unique challenges in every industry, and often, the best insights come from others who are in the same boat. Join our relaxed sessions where you can meet peers working in similar domains to share ideas, collaborate on challenges, and exchange solutions.

  • FEATURING
    Samane Igder
    API Engineering DirectorBarclays

    Samane Igder is an API Engineering Director at Barclays.

    View Samane’s profile
  • Stephanie Dreyer
    Senior Director of EngineeringPayoneer

    Stephanie Dreyer is a Senior Director of Engineering at Payoneer.

    View Stephanie’s profile
  • Dan Abel
    Senior Staff EngineerPleo

    Dan has spent more than 30 years as a software engineer and technical leader, learning better ways to ship and get feedback the team needs. He’s been the Dev in Ops teams, built new paved paths, guided engineering groups to better security, and trained folk in Agile engineering.

    He uses his experience in people and coaching to lead and guide teams, strengthen technical excellence and grow technical leadership. He works as a Senior Staff Engineer at Pleo.io

    View Dan’s profile

Table Talk

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

How do you give AI tools the context they need to generate reliable, production-ready code?

Join facilitated conversations and dive into key issues facing engineering teams

+ More

Table Talk

How do you give AI tools the context they need to generate reliable, production-ready code?

12:35 – 13:00

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Sponsored by

Unblocked x LeadDev

Join facilitated conversations and dive into key issues facing engineering teams

There’s never a single silver bullet for any problem and often you’ll need to combine the ideas of multiple people to find the perfect solution for your team. We’ll be discussing some core issues in the Table Talk sessions, hosted by a group of engineering leaders who are on hand to provide their perspectives and help guide the conversation. You can dip in and out of discussions depending on what interests you the most.

  • FEATURING
    Brandon Waselnuk
    DevRelUnblocked

    Brandon Waselnuk is a DevRel at Unblocked.

    View Brandon’s profile
  • Eduardo Janicas
    Lead Solutions ArchitectPayrails

    Eduardo Janicas is a Lead Solutions Architect at Payrails.

    View Eduardo’s profile
  • Blanca Rojo Martin
    Distinguished EngineerUBS

    Blanca is a Distinguished Engineer @ UBS, working in London. She has worked as a Software Engineer for 10 years and is now transitioning into Data Engineering.

    She specialises in solving tricky problems using code, while also leveraging the power of the engineering community within her organisation. She has been the UBS UK lead for Women in Tech and is now the co-lead of the Software Engineering Guild for EMEA.

    She believes that only by understanding people’s intersectionalities we can truly make a difference in the way we work.

    In her free time she enjoys travelling, going out, reading and playing video games, and has recently started teaching her 5 year old son to code.

    View Blanca ‘s profile

Community Representation Groups

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

Connecting leaders with disabilities

Connect with other leaders who have similar backgrounds and experiences to yours, and build a peer network for support throughout your leadership journey.

+ More

Community Representation Groups

Connecting leaders with disabilities

13:05 – 13:30

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Connect with folks over shared experiences

Everyone’s journey into leadership is tough, but folks who are underrepresented in tech often face their own unique set of challenges. And that can lead to people feeling isolated in their experiences. 

Come to the community representation groups, where you’ll be able to connect with folks who might have similar backgrounds and experiences to yours, and where you’ll be able to build a peer network for support throughout your journey.

  • FEATURING
    Matt Field
    Staff EngineerCollibra

    Matt is a seasoned SRE and Platform Engineer with over fifteen years of experience in building and operating scalable, reliable, high-performance systems, platforms, and infrastructure. He is currently a Staff Engineer in the Platform Infrastructure team at Collibra, where he is focused on developing and maintaining the company’s internal platforms, Kubernetes infrastructure, and tooling.

    View Matt’s profile
  • Aaron Moses
    Software Engineering Team LeadBBC
    View Aaron’s profile
  • Andrew Hayward
    Staff Accessibility EngineerMiro

    Andrew is a lead accessibility engineer, passionate about creating inclusive solutions for user problems. His attention to detail bridges disciplines, from code through documentation and design to project strategy. He loves nothing more than bringing product owners, designers, and other engineers together to ensure that access needs are assessed and accommodated from initial concept through to final product delivery.

    View Andrew’s profile
  • Ben Gamble
    Field CTOVerverica

    After many years of building teams & technology, Ben is now Field CTO at Ververica, Helping people get the most out of Streaming, data and Open source technology.

    View Ben ‘s profile
  • Dianing Yudono
    Career Coach

    Dianing Yudono is a neurodivergent software engineer and professional coach who helps technologists navigate career transitions, leadership challenges, and organisational change. Having experienced multiple role changes, reorgs, and the loss of her own support network, she learned how critical the right support can be. She now coaches engineers, designers, and managers to identify the support they need, regain confidence, and thrive in evolving roles.

    View Dianing’s profile

Community Representation Groups

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

Connecting women leaders

Connect with other leaders who have similar backgrounds and experiences to yours, and build a peer network for support throughout your leadership journey.

+ More

Community Representation Groups

Connecting women leaders

13:50 – 14:15

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Connect with folks over shared experiences

Everyone’s journey into leadership is tough, but folks who are underrepresented in tech often face their own unique set of challenges. And that can lead to people feeling isolated in their experiences. 

Come to the community representation groups, where you’ll be able to connect with folks who might have similar backgrounds and experiences to yours, and where you’ll be able to build a peer network for support throughout your journey.

  • FEATURING
    Nazlı Sahin
    Director of Security, Risk and ComplianceAccedo

    Nazli leads security strategy, risk management, and compliance for a global organization. Over a decade in leadership, she has shaped security policies, controls, and governance frameworks, from incident response and AI governance to ISO 27001 and GDPR compliance. She has built teams that operate independently while she focuses on strategic direction and organizational security posture. Nazli believes effective leadership means seeing potential in others and creating environments where, with the right balance of challenge, support, and trust, people grow and elevate those around them.

    View Nazlı’s profile
  • Madhura Chaganty
    Engineering ManagerElliptic

    As an Engineering Manager at Elliptic, Madhura Chaganty focuses on building high-performing teams, driving timely project deliveries, and optimising processes for greater efficiency and impact.

    With over 20 years of software development experience, she empowers teams to deliver complex projects by embracing innovation, sustainability, and emerging technologies.

    Outside of work, she is leader in Women Coding Community, actively supporting women in advancing their tech careers. By mentoring and offering strategic guidance, she helps foster a more inclusive and equitable tech community.

    View Madhura’s profile
  • Dianing Yudono
    Career Coach

    Dianing Yudono is a neurodivergent software engineer and professional coach who helps technologists navigate career transitions, leadership challenges, and organisational change. Having experienced multiple role changes, reorgs, and the loss of her own support network, she learned how critical the right support can be. She now coaches engineers, designers, and managers to identify the support they need, regain confidence, and thrive in evolving roles.

    View Dianing’s profile
  • Amber Shand
    FounderShe Bytes Back

    Amber Shand is a former software engineer (AMEX, Skyscanner) turned keynote speaker who’s delivered 100+ talks for Google, Salesforce, Sage, and Kraken.

    She founded She Bytes Back, a 3,000+ member community for women in tech, partnering with companies like Canva, Figma, and Depop. Through bi-monthly events and BRAVE on Stage, her 6-week speaking accelerator, she helps technical professionals become magnetic speakers who attract career-defining opportunities.

    Amber works with tech companies to get their engineers speaking at industry conferences, building visibility that attracts talent and strengthens their brand. She helps technical leaders develop teams who can confidently represent the company on stage, turning brilliant engineers into recognised voices in their field.

    View Amber’s profile
  • Phillipa Rodney
    Engineering ManagerCrowdstrike

    Phillipa is an experienced engineering manager, passionate about people leadership and building great engineering cultures.

    Phillipa leads with empathy and trust; by demonstrating the importance of building relationships and coaching others to realise their full potential, she empowers engineers to bring their best selves to the workplace, promotes best practices and encourages excellence across teams to build the best products.

    View Phillipa’s profile

Table Talk

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

How do you define ownership and accountability when AI is generating part of your system?

Join facilitated conversations and dive into key issues facing engineering teams

+ More

Table Talk

How do you define ownership and accountability when AI is generating part of your system?

14:35 – 15:00

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Sponsored by

Softwire x LeadDev

Join facilitated conversations and dive into key issues facing engineering teams

There’s never a single silver bullet for any problem and often you’ll need to combine the ideas of multiple people to find the perfect solution for your team. We’ll be discussing some core issues in the Table Talk sessions, hosted by a group of engineering leaders who are on hand to provide their perspectives and help guide the conversation. You can dip in and out of discussions depending on what interests you the most.

  • FEATURING
    Annjana Ramesh
    Senior Engineering ManagerMonzo

    Annjana Ramesh is an engineering leader at Monzo, building the bank’s mortgage brokerage experience. She previously led engineering teams responsible for launching Monzo’s expansion into Europe, establishing presence in Ireland.

    Annjana has over a decade of experience building and scaling engineering teams across fintech, AI and bigtech. Prior to Monzo, she held leadership roles at Wayve, Twitter and Goldman Sachs, working on SW infrastructure / platform supporting products used by millions.

    She is passionate about developing strong engineering leaders, building resilient teams, and advancing diversity and inclusion within the tech industry. Alongside her day job, Annjana runs Gaido, a leadership coaching and advisory practice that supports engineering leaders and growing organisations.

    View Annjana’s profile
  • Mariana Pasichnyk
    Senior Engineering Director IDEMIA

    Mariana is a Senior Engineering Director of the Digital ID Platform at IDEMIA, where she leads cross-functional teams across development, QA, DevOps, and delivery. She drives engineering excellence while ensuring the delivery of scalable, secure digital identity solutions. Deeply committed to talent development and team engagement, she focuses on building high-performing teams and nurturing leadership growth. Mariana brings a collaborative, people centric approach to engineering. She combines strategic vision with strong execution to deliver impactful solutions. Outside of work, she enjoys running, swimming, hiking in the mountains, learning tennis, and mentoring others.

    View Mariana’s profile

Table Talk

Experienced Manager•New Manager

How do you set an engineering and AI strategy and translate it into actionable work for teams?

Join facilitated conversations and dive into key issues facing engineering teams.

+ More

Table Talk

How do you set an engineering and AI strategy and translate it into actionable work for teams?

14:35 – 15:00

This session is suitable for:

Experienced Manager New Manager

Join facilitated conversations and dive into key issues facing engineering teams

There’s never a single silver bullet for any problem and often you’ll need to combine the ideas of multiple people to find the perfect solution for your team. We’ll be discussing some core issues in the Table Talk sessions, hosted by a group of engineering leaders who are on hand to provide their perspectives and help guide the conversation. You can dip in and out of discussions depending on what interests you the most.

  • FEATURING
    Lewis Holmes
    Principal EngineerASOS.com

    Lewis Holmes is a Principal Engineer and AI Strategist with over 20 years’ experience leading teams and helping organisations build enterprise-scale distributed systems. At ASOS.com, he supports engineering teams in adopting agentic AI through practical training, community-building, tooling and workflow design. With a background in developer experience, engineering productivity and technical training, he has trained more than 1,000 engineers across cloud computing, Kubernetes and CI/CD. He also co-created and hosted the ASOS Tech Podcast, sharing ideas on AI, automation and modern engineering.

    View Lewis’s profile
  • Simon Bruins
    Engineering LeadWise

    Simon Bruins is an Engineering Lead at Wise.

    View Simon’s profile

Community Representation Groups

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

Connecting neurodivergent leaders

Connect with other leaders who have similar backgrounds and experiences to yours, and build a peer network for support throughout your leadership journey.

+ More

Community Representation Groups

Connecting neurodivergent leaders

15:05 – 15:30

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Connect with folks over shared experiences

Everyone’s journey into leadership is tough, but folks who are underrepresented in tech often face their own unique set of challenges. And that can lead to people feeling isolated in their experiences. 

Come to the community representation groups, where you’ll be able to connect with folks who might have similar backgrounds and experiences to yours, and where you’ll be able to build a peer network for support throughout your journey.

  • FEATURING
    Matt Field
    Staff EngineerCollibra

    Matt is a seasoned SRE and Platform Engineer with over fifteen years of experience in building and operating scalable, reliable, high-performance systems, platforms, and infrastructure. He is currently a Staff Engineer in the Platform Infrastructure team at Collibra, where he is focused on developing and maintaining the company’s internal platforms, Kubernetes infrastructure, and tooling.

    View Matt’s profile
  • Elizabeth Hanson
    Head of Data EngineeringDeepL

    Elizabeth Hanson is Head of Engineering at DeepL, one of Europe’s
    leading AI companies, where she leads the Data Track supporting business
    and engineering users with their analytical and data needs. With over 20
    years of experience in technology and more than six years in engineering
    leadership, Elizabeth has spent the last five years building data and AI
    products to support various businesses. She previously held roles at Just
    Eat Takeaway, Civica, and Fasthosts. Elizabeth has been actively supporting neurodiverse team members for many years being and active leader of the Neurodiversity support networks at Just Eat, Benchsci and DeepL.

    View Elizabeth’s profile
  • Aaron Moses
    Software Engineering Team LeadBBC
    View Aaron’s profile
  • Ben Gamble
    Field CTOVerverica

    After many years of building teams & technology, Ben is now Field CTO at Ververica, Helping people get the most out of Streaming, data and Open source technology.

    View Ben ‘s profile
  • Dianing Yudono
    Career Coach

    Dianing Yudono is a neurodivergent software engineer and professional coach who helps technologists navigate career transitions, leadership challenges, and organisational change. Having experienced multiple role changes, reorgs, and the loss of her own support network, she learned how critical the right support can be. She now coaches engineers, designers, and managers to identify the support they need, regain confidence, and thrive in evolving roles.

    View Dianing’s profile
  • Amber Shand
    FounderShe Bytes Back

    Amber Shand is a former software engineer (AMEX, Skyscanner) turned keynote speaker who’s delivered 100+ talks for Google, Salesforce, Sage, and Kraken.

    She founded She Bytes Back, a 3,000+ member community for women in tech, partnering with companies like Canva, Figma, and Depop. Through bi-monthly events and BRAVE on Stage, her 6-week speaking accelerator, she helps technical professionals become magnetic speakers who attract career-defining opportunities.

    Amber works with tech companies to get their engineers speaking at industry conferences, building visibility that attracts talent and strengthens their brand. She helps technical leaders develop teams who can confidently represent the company on stage, turning brilliant engineers into recognised voices in their field.

    View Amber’s profile

Table Talk

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

How do you safely integrate AI coding agents into your development lifecycle without creating new bottlenecks?

Join facilitated conversations and dive into key issues facing engineering teams

+ More

Table Talk

How do you safely integrate AI coding agents into your development lifecycle without creating new bottlenecks?

15:35 – 16:00

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Sponsored by

Coder LeadDev

Join facilitated conversations and dive into key issues facing engineering teams

There’s never a single silver bullet for any problem and often you’ll need to combine the ideas of multiple people to find the perfect solution for your team. We’ll be discussing some core issues in the Table Talk sessions, hosted by a group of engineering leaders who are on hand to provide their perspectives and help guide the conversation. You can dip in and out of discussions depending on what interests you the most.

  • FEATURING
    Akundi Vamshi Krishna
    Engineering LeadWise

    Akundi Vamshi Krishna is an Engineering Lead at Wise.

    View Akundi’s profile
  • Shraddha Nayak
    Director of EngineeringAltus Group

    Shraddha Nayak is the Director of Engineering at Altus Group.

    View Shraddha’s profile
  • Eric Paulsen
    Field CTO – EMEACoder

    Eric Paulsen is the EMEA Field CTO at Coder, an open-source, self-hosted cloud development environment platform. A developer at heart, Eric began his career writing code and quickly became known for his ability to support and uplift fellow engineers. That passion for technology and collaboration evolved into guiding enterprise organisations, particularly in highly regulated industries, through their Developer Experience transformations.
    As Coder’s Founding Sales Engineer, Eric has remained deeply hands-on, continuously expanding his knowledge in emerging areas such as AI agents and automation. Today, he blends technical depth with strategic insight to help customers modernise secure, scalable development environments.

    View Eric’s profile

Table Talk

Director+•Experienced Manager•Staff+

How do you put AI guardrails in place that enable teams to move fast without increasing risk?

Join facilitated conversations and dive into key issues facing engineering teams.

+ More

Table Talk

How do you put AI guardrails in place that enable teams to move fast without increasing risk?

15:35 – 16:00

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager Staff+

Join facilitated conversations and dive into key issues facing engineering teams

There’s never a single silver bullet for any problem and often you’ll need to combine the ideas of multiple people to find the perfect solution for your team. We’ll be discussing some core issues in the Table Talk sessions, hosted by a group of engineering leaders who are on hand to provide their perspectives and help guide the conversation. You can dip in and out of discussions depending on what interests you the most.

Table Talk

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

How do you balance speed and quality when AI is part of the delivery process?

Join facilitated conversations and dive into key issues facing engineering teams

+ More

Table Talk

How do you balance speed and quality when AI is part of the delivery process?

16:20 – 16:45

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Sponsored by

Join facilitated conversations and dive into key issues facing engineering teams

There’s never a single silver bullet for any problem and often you’ll need to combine the ideas of multiple people to find the perfect solution for your team. We’ll be discussing some core issues in the Table Talk sessions, hosted by a group of engineering leaders who are on hand to provide their perspectives and help guide the conversation. You can dip in and out of discussions depending on what interests you the most.

  • FEATURING
    Bogdana-Elena A
    Engineering ManagerZoopla

    Bogdana-Elena A is an Engineering Manager at Zoopla.

    View Bogdana-Elena’s profile
  • Tom Young
    Senior Engineering ManagerClearScore

    A people-first engineering leader who previously worked for companies including the BBC, Bloomberg and The Economist, Tom spent a decade working in software quality before transitioning into team leadership. He has a background in education and lives in East London with 4 cats. If you want to have a chat, coming up to him and asking to see pictures of his pets is always a good icebreaker!

    View Tom ‘s profile
Connection Zone

Office hours

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

Meet the speakers

Chat with the speakers face-to-face in a relaxed, conversational environment.

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Office hours

Meet the speakers

10:00 – 10:30

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

If you’re inspired by a talk, want to learn more, or just want to chat about it with other folks, head to our Office Hours area where our speakers will be waiting for you.

Speed coaching

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

Speed coaching with Mathias Meyer

Watch or participate in free 1:1 coaching

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Speed coaching

Speed coaching with Mathias Meyer

11:05 – 11:30

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Watch or participate in free 1:1 coaching with Mathias Meyer.

Learning new information is always great, but sometimes solutions can feel too one-size-fits-all for your specific circumstances. How can advice be applied to a team of 10 or a team of 10,000?

On the other hand, coaching is directly tailored to your specific challenges and the specific environment they exist in. Mathias will be hosting one-on-one coaching sessions with attendees to get into the nuts and bolts of the challenges they’re facing. Come and have a conversation, or peek into the challenges other leaders are facing.

  • FEATURING
    Mathias Meyer
    Founding Partner & Executive CoachThe Intentional Organization

    Mathias is Founding Parter and Executive Coach at The Intentional Organization and executive coach to founders, CTOs, and senior engineering leaders. He supports his clients and their leadership teams in their personal and professional growth as they’re scaling out their business and their departments. Together with his business partner Sara, he’s co-authoring the forthcoming book “The Intentional Organization.” Starting his career as an engineer, Mathias has later worked in founder, CEO, and CTO roles across different companies, including Travis CI and Reaction Commerce.

    View Mathias’s profile

Solution Swap

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager

My team seemed brilliant to begin with, but things quickly went south. How can I stop that from happening again?

Work together to find ways of solving a common problem posed by our moderator.

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Solution Swap

My team seemed brilliant to begin with, but things quickly went south. How can I stop that from happening again?

12:35 – 13:00

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager

Quiet quitting. Rage quitting. Disengagement, burnout, mental health breaks. Stalled careers, unclear expectations, slanging matches, stolen credit, and betrayal. Poisoned relationships, broken promises. Politics.

There are endless stupid ways we can accidentally lose our best people, or turn them into our worst – this is a session to share some of your people-related mistakes, and hear about the worst mistakes of your peers.

Supported by Ceri Newton-Sargunar, a behavioural scientist and skilled senior leadership coach, you’ll also get some understanding along the way, of why things go as badly as they do – so you can take steps to make sure they, and you don’t fall into the same traps (again).

  • FEATURING
    Ceri Newton-Sargunar
    OD & Interactions specialist Thirsty Horse Consulting

    Ceri is an Interactions Specialist, Chaologist, and trainee Neuroscientist who helps people at all levels work together more effectively.

    With a background in teaching and psychology, she makes evidence-based research practical and accessible for leaders seeking more effective approaches. A qualified coach, and Systemic Interventions Consultant specialising in complex Team Dynamics, she brings a huge wealth of experience working with senior leadership teams across government, multinational organisations and start-ups.

    She speaks globally, about the magnificent intermingling of behavioural science and hopeful, impactful change – and, of course, brains.

    View Ceri’s profile

Peer Hangouts

Tech Lead

Tech Lead hangout

Hang out with other leaders in similar roles.

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Peer Hangouts

Tech Lead hangout

13:50 – 14:15

This session is suitable for:

Tech Lead

Comparing notes on shared challenges that come with your role has never been easier. Peer Hangouts are 30-minute, casual networking sessions for folks to talk through their experiences and challenges with peers who understand the context they’re working in. Drop in and join a conversation!

  • FEATURING
    James Alexander
    Lead EngineerITV

    James Alexander is a Lead Engineer at ITVX, the UK’s fastest-growing streaming service, helping shape the architecture and delivery of its platform for over 45 million users. With more than two decades in software engineering, he focuses on building resilient systems and improving collaboration at scale. His recent work spans subscriptions, payments, and Minimum Viable Company initiatives. He promotes experimentation through A/B testing and Long Term Holdout Groups and leads on compliance, setting standards and guidance across ITV. James champions ITV’s neurodiversity network and working class group, and enjoys mentoring and supporting students and colleagues to achieve their potential.

    View James’s profile
  • Rui Posse
    Engineering ManagerRaaft

    Engineering Manager and Full-Stack engineer with 10+ years’ experience leading remote teams, Rui specialises in JavaScript/TypeScript, Vue.js and Node.js. Passionate about mentoring and team culture, he focuses on clear direction, modern engineering practices and pragmatic delivery that balances business impact with technical quality. He is passionate about tech communities and actively engages in sharing knowledge and supporting other engineers.

    View Rui’s profile
  • Humayra Hanif
    Lead Software Engineerthisdotsoftware

    With a decade of experience as a software engineer, Humayra has established herself as a Lead Software Engineer while concurrently co-founding Hulm Club – a Muslim-focussed community of visionaries and innovators.

    She has navigated various roles in engineering leadership at startups, accumulating extensive expertise along the way. Her expertise spans various sectors including finance, data, health, and retail marketing, where she has led teams to consistently deliver innovative solutions.

    Outside of her professional pursuits, Humayra actively engages as a writer, speaker, and mentor, contributing to the growth and diversity of the tech community. Her overarching objective remains focused on leveraging technology to drive positive change on a global scale.

    View Humayra’s profile

Speed coaching

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

Speed coaching with Mathias Meyer

Watch or participate in free 1:1 coaching

+ More

Speed coaching

Speed coaching with Mathias Meyer

11:50 – 12:15

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Watch or participate in free 1:1 coaching with Mathias Meyer.

Learning new information is always great, but sometimes solutions can feel too one-size-fits-all for your specific circumstances. How can advice be applied to a team of 10 or a team of 10,000?

On the other hand, coaching is directly tailored to your specific challenges and the specific environment they exist in. Mathias will be hosting one-on-one coaching sessions with attendees to get into the nuts and bolts of the challenges they’re facing. Come and have a conversation, or peek into the challenges other leaders are facing.

  • FEATURING
    Mathias Meyer
    Founding Partner & Executive CoachThe Intentional Organization

    Mathias is Founding Parter and Executive Coach at The Intentional Organization and executive coach to founders, CTOs, and senior engineering leaders. He supports his clients and their leadership teams in their personal and professional growth as they’re scaling out their business and their departments. Together with his business partner Sara, he’s co-authoring the forthcoming book “The Intentional Organization.” Starting his career as an engineer, Mathias has later worked in founder, CEO, and CTO roles across different companies, including Travis CI and Reaction Commerce.

    View Mathias’s profile

Speed coaching

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

Speed coaching with Mathias Meyer

Watch or participate in free 1:1 coaching

+ More

Speed coaching

Speed coaching with Mathias Meyer

14:35 – 15:00

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Watch or participate in free 1:1 coaching with Mathias Meyer.

Learning new information is always great, but sometimes solutions can feel too one-size-fits-all for your specific circumstances. How can advice be applied to a team of 10 or a team of 10,000?

On the other hand, coaching is directly tailored to your specific challenges and the specific environment they exist in. Mathias will be hosting one-on-one coaching sessions with attendees to get into the nuts and bolts of the challenges they’re facing. Come and have a conversation, or peek into the challenges other leaders are facing.

  • FEATURING
    Mathias Meyer
    Founding Partner & Executive CoachThe Intentional Organization

    Mathias is Founding Parter and Executive Coach at The Intentional Organization and executive coach to founders, CTOs, and senior engineering leaders. He supports his clients and their leadership teams in their personal and professional growth as they’re scaling out their business and their departments. Together with his business partner Sara, he’s co-authoring the forthcoming book “The Intentional Organization.” Starting his career as an engineer, Mathias has later worked in founder, CEO, and CTO roles across different companies, including Travis CI and Reaction Commerce.

    View Mathias’s profile

Peer Hangouts

Staff+

Principal Engineer hangout

Hang out with other leaders in similar roles.

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Peer Hangouts

Principal Engineer hangout

15:35 – 16:00

This session is suitable for:

Staff+

Comparing notes on shared challenges that come with your role has never been easier. Peer Hangouts are 30-minute, casual networking sessions for folks to talk through their experiences and challenges with peers who understand the context they’re working in. Drop in and join a conversation!

  • FEATURING
    Steven Withey
    Principal Security EngineerASOS.com

    Steven Withey is a Principal Security Engineer at ASOS.com.

    View Steven’s profile
  • Michael Tweed
    Principal Software EngineerSkyscanner

    Michael is currently a Principal Software Engineer at Skyscanner where he is responsible for leading their Mobile Platform squads. He also has a keen interest in Mobile Observability and Data Production, and is helping drive Skyscanner’s long-term vision in these areas.

    View Michael ‘s profile

Solution Swap

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Tech Lead

My feedback either doesn’t land, doesn’t change anything or causes a big reaction. What can I do?

Work together to find ways of solving a common problem posed by our moderator.

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Solution Swap

My feedback either doesn’t land, doesn’t change anything or causes a big reaction. What can I do?

15:35 – 16:00

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Tech Lead

With great change comes great uncertainty. Sadly, the resulting pace + pressure combination often means well-intended feedback derails even our best people. When it goes catastrophically wrong, the whole team is affected – seriously risking our ability to deliver quality at speed, in the exact moments we need everyone at the top of their game.

So let’s have a serious conversation about how we fix feedback in high-stakes environments.

Led by Ceri Newton-Sargunar – neuroscientist, experienced senior leadership coach and team dynamics specialist – this session offers you a unique opportunity: invaluable facilitated peer exchanges, informed by in-the-moment crucial insights from behavioural science and neuroscience.

You’ll leave the room with a clear understanding of exactly why feedback conversations go wrong, and how to guard against it. And you’ll walk into your next conversation confident, better-equipped to stop things falling apart, and keeping your team focused on the goal rather than the drama.

  • FEATURING
    Ceri Newton-Sargunar
    OD & Interactions specialist Thirsty Horse Consulting

    Ceri is an Interactions Specialist, Chaologist, and trainee Neuroscientist who helps people at all levels work together more effectively.

    With a background in teaching and psychology, she makes evidence-based research practical and accessible for leaders seeking more effective approaches. A qualified coach, and Systemic Interventions Consultant specialising in complex Team Dynamics, she brings a huge wealth of experience working with senior leadership teams across government, multinational organisations and start-ups.

    She speaks globally, about the magnificent intermingling of behavioural science and hopeful, impactful change – and, of course, brains.

    View Ceri’s profile

Peer Hangouts

Experienced Manager•New Manager

Engineering Manager hangout

Hang out with other leaders in similar roles.

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Peer Hangouts

Engineering Manager hangout

16:20 – 16:45

This session is suitable for:

Experienced Manager New Manager

Comparing notes on shared challenges that come with your role has never been easier. Peer Hangouts are 30-minute, casual networking sessions for folks to talk through their experiences and challenges with peers who understand the context they’re working in. Drop in and join a conversation!

  • FEATURING
    Amélie Thery
    Senior Engineering ManagerPrima

    Amélie is a passionate and empathetic leader. She aims to build resilient and high-performing teams, led by caring and high-performing individuals. She is French and lives in London, and currently works for Prima, the leading Italian digital insurance company.

    View Amélie’s profile
  • Theo Nicolaou
    Front End Engineering ManagerITV

    Theo is an Engineering Manager in the Viewer Technology department at ITV. He has a background in front-end development, and uses his expertise to grow and lead teams working on the ITVX streaming platform. Outside of work he can be found learning the ropes of parenting, laughing/crying about Spurs and following the F1 racing.

    View Theo’s profile

Solution Swap

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Tech Lead

I’ve got people doing brilliant things, but I don’t have any budget for promotions. How can I motivate them without spending anything?

Work together to find ways of solving a common problem posed by our moderator.

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Solution Swap

I’ve got people doing brilliant things, but I don’t have any budget for promotions. How can I motivate them without spending anything?

16:20 – 16:45

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Tech Lead

Budgets are strapped. Spend is fixed. Every penny has to be signed off in a process that can take weeks – so how on earth do you motivate people to do well, without using a financial reward?

This solution swap will explore exactly that: tips and tools from your peers, plus insights from behavioural science to help you find the options that are best for you, your people, and your organisation. We’ll look at motivation, accountability and ownership, preventing disengagement and “quiet quitting” so you understand what helps create engagement – and what might trip you up.

Facilitated by Ceri Newton-Sargunar, experienced senior leadership coach, behavioural scientist and team dynamics specialist, You’ll walk away with a page full of notes, your head full of ideas, and some practical steps to take when you get back to your team.

  • FEATURING
    Ceri Newton-Sargunar
    OD & Interactions specialist Thirsty Horse Consulting

    Ceri is an Interactions Specialist, Chaologist, and trainee Neuroscientist who helps people at all levels work together more effectively.

    With a background in teaching and psychology, she makes evidence-based research practical and accessible for leaders seeking more effective approaches. A qualified coach, and Systemic Interventions Consultant specialising in complex Team Dynamics, she brings a huge wealth of experience working with senior leadership teams across government, multinational organisations and start-ups.

    She speaks globally, about the magnificent intermingling of behavioural science and hopeful, impactful change – and, of course, brains.

    View Ceri’s profile

Community Representation Groups

Director+•Experienced Manager

Connecting senior managers from underrepresented groups

Connect with other leaders who have similar backgrounds and experiences to yours, and build a peer network for support throughout your leadership journey.

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Community Representation Groups

Connecting senior managers from underrepresented groups

18:15 – 18:40

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager

LGBTQIA+ and BIPOC communities, neurodivergent, disabled people, and women have long been grossly underrepresented in tech, and even more so at senior management levels, where being “the first [insert your identity here]” in your company at your level is a common experience. We want to create this space specifically for you to connect and find community. During the session, you will receive guiding questions to discuss with your peers and a space to get to know, learn from, and celebrate each other, together.

Who this is for: We welcome any senior managers (Director and above) who are members of underrepresented groups in tech. We want to create a space for the many groups with little representation at those levels, so if you belong to a group that isn’t specifically mentioned here, please join and let the hosts know. You don’t need a DirectorPlus pass to attend.

  • FEATURING
    Elizabeth Hanson
    Head of Data EngineeringDeepL

    Elizabeth Hanson is Head of Engineering at DeepL, one of Europe’s
    leading AI companies, where she leads the Data Track supporting business
    and engineering users with their analytical and data needs. With over 20
    years of experience in technology and more than six years in engineering
    leadership, Elizabeth has spent the last five years building data and AI
    products to support various businesses. She previously held roles at Just
    Eat Takeaway, Civica, and Fasthosts. Elizabeth has been actively supporting neurodiverse team members for many years being and active leader of the Neurodiversity support networks at Just Eat, Benchsci and DeepL.

    View Elizabeth’s profile
  • Linn Foster
    Director of Engineering ManagementExclaimer

    As Director of Engineering Management at Exclaimer, Linn leads Exclaimer’s Engineering department with a strong focus on people leadership, continuous improvement, and technical excellence. She is passionate about building highly engaged and collaborative teams by fostering a people-first culture.

     

    View Linn’s profile
  • Dan Blundell
    Engineering DirectorGymshark

    Dan is an engineering leader and builder of technical teams. He aims to create environments where each person feels valued, supported and can learn continuously, together. At Gymshark, Dan heads up Core Engineering and is responsible for data pipelines, API and integration development and platform reliability engineering.

    Dan will forever be a student of leadership, values feedback above almost anything else and would love to hear how best to help you. His latest side project is taming the tantrums of two toddlers and aims to coach them in the ways of empathy, responsibility and being a good human. Dan will eventually write a book but for now, tweets irregularly at @danblundell and posts sporadically at danblundell.com

    View Dan’s profile
  • Sally Lait
    Fractional technology leader and advisor

    Sally Lait specialises in building strong engineering culture, and aims to create supportive and inclusive environments for managers, developers, and teams to thrive and do fantastic technical work.

    Her roles have included helping to change the way the world deals with death as VP of Engineering (plus IT & Data and Insights) at Farewill, prior to which she led Monzo’s web discipline and engineering across Operations through hypergrowth. Other experience involves founding a digital transformation consultancy with clients including the Manor Racing F1 team and RNLI, and working as Head of Technology for a global digital agency.
    Sally’s a strong advocate for building software and teams alike with empathy, responsibility, and accessibility in mind. She’s spoken at events around the world, is on Mastodon at @https://mastodon.social/@sally, and you can find out more about her at sally.dev.

    View Sally’s profile
  • Lena Reinhard
    Engineering Leader, Organizational Developer, Coach, Facilitator

    Lena Reinhard is a seasoned technology leader, currently helping leaders and their teams succeed through her work as a leadership coach, organizational developer, and facilitator. Having served the majority of her 20-year career in leadership roles, such as VP Engineering with CircleCI, Travis CI, and a SaaS startup co-founder & CEO, she has partnered with a variety of remote, hybrid, and co-located companies at all stages, from startups, to scale-ups, corporations, and NGOs. Lena loves to paint, read, and ride her bike around the forests and lakes of her home, Berlin, in Germany. She hosts O’Reilly’s Tech Leadership Tuesday podcast.

    View Lena’s profile
Workshop Zone

Workshop

Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

How to train your 𝖽̶𝗋̶𝖺̶𝗀̶𝗈̶𝗇̶ boss

In this practical workshop, learn how to better understand how your manager works, reduce friction, and align more effectively.

  • Lena Reinhard
    Engineering Leader, Organizational Developer, Coach, Facilitator
+ More

Workshop

How to train your 𝖽̶𝗋̶𝖺̶𝗀̶𝗈̶𝗇̶ boss

11:05 – 12:30

This session is suitable for:

Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Having a boss isn’t always as fun as it sounds, and many of us struggle to make the most out of our work with the manager we have, leading to misalignment, friction, and frustration for all parties involved. But how effectively you manage up is a crucial skill, even more as you advance in your career.

That’s why you’ll learn how to make more out of your work with your boss in this workshop with someone who’s been on all sides of this challenge: I’ve managed hundreds of people, had dozens of bosses all from great to terrible, and coached engineers and managers on working better with theirs.

You’ll learn how to reverse engineer the way your boss works and walk away with a practical framework and tools that you can start using immediately and that will improve your work with your manager, including.

This workshop is for anyone who has a manager, no matter if you’re an engineer, technical lead, or manager yourself, you will take away practical approaches to transform your relationship with your manager and accelerate your career growthHow to use your technical expertise to identify hidden system issues by analyzing code patterns, PR structures, and team interactions.

  • FEATURING
    Lena Reinhard
    Engineering Leader, Organizational Developer, Coach, Facilitator

    Lena Reinhard is a seasoned technology leader, currently helping leaders and their teams succeed through her work as a leadership coach, organizational developer, and facilitator. Having served the majority of her 20-year career in leadership roles, such as VP Engineering with CircleCI, Travis CI, and a SaaS startup co-founder & CEO, she has partnered with a variety of remote, hybrid, and co-located companies at all stages, from startups, to scale-ups, corporations, and NGOs. Lena loves to paint, read, and ride her bike around the forests and lakes of her home, Berlin, in Germany. She hosts O’Reilly’s Tech Leadership Tuesday podcast.

    View Lena’s profile

Workshop

Experienced Manager•New Manager

Crisis simulation: Navigating leadership challenges in real-time

A high-pressure crisis simulation for engineering leaders to practise fast decision-making, stakeholder management, and team alignment in realistic scenarios.

+ More

Workshop

Crisis simulation: Navigating leadership challenges in real-time

11:05 – 12:30

This session is suitable for:

Experienced Manager New Manager

In this interactive workshop, you’ll engage in a high-pressure crisis simulation tailored for engineering leadership roles. Drawing from real-world scenarios, you’ll collaborate in teams to practice and share response strategies… but you’ll need to stay on your toes for extra doses of chaos throughout.

This workshop addresses the critical need for engineering leaders to be adept at managing crises that extend beyond technical failures. By simulating real-world challenges, participants will be better equipped to lead their teams through uncertainty, maintain operational continuity, and uphold organizational values under pressure. The session aims to give you a safe way to practice decision-making, communication, and team alignment under pressure, learn from others’ experiences, plus hopefully have some fun with it along the way!

What will you learn?

  • Less about artefacts or resources to take away, more about the experience and relationship building along the way.
  • Strengthen your ability to lead under pressure, make fast trade-offs, and manage stakeholders during fast-evolving tech crises.
  • Fun! A different, high energy format to some other sessions.
  • See how other senior leaders approach the same problem.
  • FEATURING
    Sally Lait
    Fractional technology leader and advisor

    Sally Lait specialises in building strong engineering culture, and aims to create supportive and inclusive environments for managers, developers, and teams to thrive and do fantastic technical work.

    Her roles have included helping to change the way the world deals with death as VP of Engineering (plus IT & Data and Insights) at Farewill, prior to which she led Monzo’s web discipline and engineering across Operations through hypergrowth. Other experience involves founding a digital transformation consultancy with clients including the Manor Racing F1 team and RNLI, and working as Head of Technology for a global digital agency.
    Sally’s a strong advocate for building software and teams alike with empathy, responsibility, and accessibility in mind. She’s spoken at events around the world, is on Mastodon at @https://mastodon.social/@sally, and you can find out more about her at sally.dev.

    View Sally’s profile

Workshop

Experienced Manager•New Manager•Tech Lead

Team building at the age of AI

Explore how AI is reshaping engineering leadership, and learn to create clear team agreements, evolve your role, and build the human skills that matter most.

+ More

Workshop

Team building at the age of AI

11:05 – 12:30

This session is suitable for:

Experienced Manager New Manager Tech Lead

The integration of AI into engineering teams isn’t just changing how work gets done – it’s fundamentally shifting team dynamics, individual roles, and the emotional landscape of leadership. In this interactive workshop, you’ll tackle the real challenges: creating clear agreements about AI use on your team, evolving your leadership approach in the age of AI, and identifying the skills your team needs to succeed in this new reality.. You’ll leave with practical tools including a framework for building your team’s AI charter, strategies for navigating your evolving leadership role, and a clear approach for developing the human skills that become more valuable as AI handles routine work.

What will you learn?

  • Create your team AI charter
    • Establish clear, shared agreements about how your team will use AI tools, what standards you’ll maintain, and where human judgment remains essential.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​
  • Navigate your evolving role
    • Shift from managing tasks to developing capabilities, balancing team members at different AI adoption levels, and leading effectively in the new landscape.
  • Develop the skills your team needs most
    • Identify and intentionally build the critical capabilities like complex problem framing, systems thinking, and cross-functional communication that become more valuable when AI handles routine work.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​
Suzan Bond workshop
  • FEATURING
    Suzan Bond
    Founder & CEOConstellary

    Suzan Bond is the founder and CEO of Constellary. With nearly two decades in tech, Suzan has worked with hundreds of engineering leaders and leadership teams to help them navigate change and meet the challenges of organizational leadership. Her work these days includes preparing new directors for the role, coaching senior engineering leaders and creating cohesive leadership teams.

    View Suzan’s profile

Workshop

Director+

Leading through change

Practical frameworks to diagnose change, align initiatives with culture, and turn uncertainty into deliberate action that drives execution, momentum, and lasting organizational transformation.

+ More

Workshop

Leading through change

11:05 – 12:30

This session is suitable for:

Director+

Sponsored by

Change happens to us. Change happens because of us.

The difference between reactive survival and intentional transformation defines great tech leaders. This interactive workshop will explore both how we understand and respond to change, but also how we strategize and make our own changes happening. You will leave with:

  • A diagnosis of the type and scale of change you are facing
  • A design for change initiatives that align with your engineering culture
  • Concrete actions to drive execution
  • This session is designed for leaders who want to move from managing change to mastering it
  • FEATURING
    Hywel Carver
    CTO-turned-FounderSkiller Whale

    Hywel wrote his first program in C aged 9. After graduating with an MEng from Cambridge, he dropped out of his PhD programme to co-found his first start-up. Today, Hywel is Skiller Whale’s Co-Founder and CEO. He runs a dinner club for CTOs, a podcast for tech leaders called ‘Primarily Context-Based’, and is designing and building his own 8-bit computer for playing Pong. In his 12+ year career, he’s been building and scaling start-ups. With Skiller Whale, he is drawing on that experience to solve the biggest problem he faced as a CTO: learning for engineering teams.

    View Hywel’s profile

Workshop

Staff+•Tech Lead

Telling the story of technical debt: From case study to business buy-in

Learn how to turn technical debt into a compelling business case, align with organisational goals, and get stakeholders invested in the solution.

+ More

Workshop

Telling the story of technical debt: From case study to business buy-in

13:20 – 14:45

This session is suitable for:

Staff+ Tech Lead

Moving from “complaining about code” to “proposing a business solution” is the most critical shift a technical leader can make.

In this focused session, we will analyse real-world case studies to understand why some technical debt initiatives thrive while others fail. You will learn how to translate technical pain into business risk and opportunity, framing your proposal in a way that aligns with organisational goals.

Leave with a toolkit to communicate the impact of debt so that stakeholders don’t just understand the problem, they want to be part of the solution.

  • FEATURING
    Blanca Garcia Gil
    Principal Engineer, Transformational Coach & FounderStaffPlusEngineer.com

    Blanca is the founder of staffplusengineer.com, leadership coach, workshop facilitator and public speaker.

    Before taking the leap into coaching, she worked as a principal engineer, building resilient data analytics platforms. She spent nearly two decades working for different corporations in a variety of tech roles before making the transition to working with data. Her most recent roles were at the BBC and the fintech startup topi.

    View Blanca’s profile

Workshop

Experienced Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

Diagnosing performance problems without the guesswork

Learn to diagnose real performance bottlenecks using flamegraphs, building fast intuition to identify costly queries, GC pressure, and hidden overhead.

+ More

Workshop

Diagnosing performance problems without the guesswork

13:20 – 14:45

This session is suitable for:

Experienced Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Your app is slow. You add caching, tweak a database index, maybe throw more hardware at it. Sometimes it works, but mostly you’re guessing. This workshop changes that.

You’ll learn to use flamegraphs, the single most effective tool for understanding where your application actually spends time. Through live demos and interactive diagnosis of real-world profiles, you’ll build the intuition to spot N+1 queries, GC pressure, serialisation costs, and hidden middleware overhead in seconds.

We’ll profile in Ruby (Vernier) and Go (pprof), proving the mental model transfers across languages. You’ll also get an AI-assisted prompt template that cuts initial triage from 20 minutes to 2.

You’ll leave with a concrete skill, a reference card, and a specific task to try Monday morning. No vendor lock-in, no theory.

  • FEATURING
    Elena Tanasoiu
    Staff Software EngineerGitHub

    Elena Tanasoiu is a Staff Engineer on GitHub’s Performance Engineering team. She spends her time making one of the world’s largest Ruby on Rails applications faster by profiling production traffic, diagnosing bottlenecks, and occasionally convincing teams they don’t need more hardware. She has a fondness for flamegraphs because they never lie.

    View Elena’s profile

Workshop

Director+

Reclaim your time, reclaim your leadership

In this transformative workshop, we will challenge the limiting beliefs preventing you from managing your time. You will gain clarity on the power of managing your time, how to increase your impact and identify areas for change. Additionally, you will develop practical strategies to prioritise what truly matters and lead with purpose.

+ More

Workshop

Reclaim your time, reclaim your leadership

13:20 – 14:45

This session is suitable for:

Director+

Do you feel that you are perpetually overwhelmed by meetings, emails, and the demands of others? Do you feel like you’ve lost control of your most valuable asset—your time? If you do, then you are not alone and this is the workshop for you.

In this transformative workshop, we will challenge the limiting beliefs preventing you from managing your time. You will gain clarity on the power of managing your time, how to increase your impact and identify areas for change. Additionally, you will develop practical strategies to prioritise what truly matters and lead with purpose.

You will leave the workshop with a specific set of actions and experiments for you to take back into your work.

  • FEATURING
    Joel Chippindale
    CTO CoachMonkey's Thumb Ltd

    Joel Chippindale is a CTO Coach who supports talented start-up and scale-up CTOs to successfully navigate the many changes in their roles as their companies evolve.

    He also has over 20 years experience building, scaling and leading software development teams, including CTO roles at Econsultancy, FutureLearn and Unmade.

    View Joel’s profile

Workshop

Staff+•Tech Lead

Translating up: Engineering advocacy for the C-suite

Learn to translate engineering ideas into executive language that reframes risk, secures buy-in, and accelerates smart experimentation.

+ More

Workshop

Translating up: Engineering advocacy for the C-suite

13:20 – 14:45

This session is suitable for:

Staff+ Tech Lead

Sponsored by

CircleCI Logo LeadDev

You know what needs to change. You see the technical opportunities clearly. But when you bring initiatives to executives, they hear “risky change” not “controlled experiment.” The result? Great ideas die in planning, technical debt compounds, and your team runs obsolete processes while competitors experiment their way forward.

The gap isn’t your technical competence—it’s translation. Executives operate in a different context with different constraints and accountabilities. They evaluate initiatives using frameworks like opportunity cost, customer impact, and risk management. Most staff+ engineers never learn to speak this language.

In this workshop, CircleCI CTO Rob Zuber pulls back the curtain on how executives actually evaluate technical initiatives. You’ll learn how to better communicate and leverage technical frameworks to shift perception from “this sounds risky” to “this is a smart opportunity.” Discover how to frame experimentation as hypothesis testing, turn one-way doors into two-way doors, and position engineering investments using the same frameworks executives use for any strategic decision.

You’ll leave with practical tools to drive better alignment between your engineering and the board so you can advocate for and focus on outcomes that drive the business forward.

  • FEATURING
    Rob Zuber
    CTOCircleCI

    Rob Zuber is a 20-year veteran of software startups; a three-time founder, and a five-time CTO. Since joining CircleCI, Rob has seen the company through its Series F funding and delivered on product innovation at scale while leading a team of 150+ engineers distributed worldwide.

    View Rob’s profile

Workshop

Director+

Leadership competencies for Directors & beyond

Assess your leadership strengths, identify critical gaps, and build a clear, practical plan to grow your impact and effectiveness as a senior engineering leader.

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Workshop

Leadership competencies for Directors & beyond

15:50 – 17:15

This session is suitable for:

Director+

You’ve made it to Director or beyond – congratulations! But now what?

The career ladder gets fuzzy, expectations aren’t clear, and you’re left wondering: “Am I actually doing this right?”

You’ve moved further away from managing the day-to-day work to developing other leaders, influencing strategy, and navigating complex organizational dynamics. The stakes feel higher, but the roadmap for success isn’t obvious.

This workshop gives you a framework to answer that question and more. We’ll walk through the core competencies that define effective senior engineering leaders. You’ll assess yourself against these competencies, identify your strengths and gaps, and create your own customized development plan to chart your continued growth as a leader.

In this workshop, you’ll:

  • Understand the key competencies that define successful Director+ leaders
  • Assess your current strengths and development areas across 7 core competencies
  • Build a personalized action plan for your continued growth
  • FEATURING
    Suzan Bond
    Founder & CEOConstellary

    Suzan Bond is the founder and CEO of Constellary. With nearly two decades in tech, Suzan has worked with hundreds of engineering leaders and leadership teams to help them navigate change and meet the challenges of organizational leadership. Her work these days includes preparing new directors for the role, coaching senior engineering leaders and creating cohesive leadership teams.

    View Suzan’s profile

Workshop

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

Product sense for product engineering with AI

Build stronger product judgment in the AI era. Learn how to decide what is truly worth building before writing code.

  • Oana May MOATCRAFT™
    FAANG Product Leadership Coach, Founder of MOATCRAFT™
+ More

Workshop

Product sense for product engineering with AI

15:50 – 17:15

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

80% of the features built are barely or never used (Pendo Report).

Now, AI makes it easier to build even more of the wrong things. While for engineers, the real advantage is no longer just execution, but judgment. Knowing what is worth building: why it matters for customers, for the business, in the market, etc.

In this interactive session, Oana May, ex-Meta and founder of MOATCRAFT, will share the practical product sense system she has used to coach 500+ product leaders in the Bay Area, NY, Seattle, etc.

You will learn:

  • How business and product leaders decide what is worth investing in
  • Why many ideas fail to gain traction
  • How to bring structure to ambiguous decisions before any code is written

Through live collaborative exercises, you will practice applying this framework in real time.

You will leave with practical tools to sharpen your own product sense, coach stronger decision-making on your team, and help engineers move from execution-focused thinking to business-aligned problem solving.

  • FEATURING
    Oana May
    FAANG Product Leadership Coach, Founder of MOATCRAFT™MOATCRAFT™

    Oana May is an ex-Meta leader, FAANG product coach, and 3x founder. She recently launched MOATCRAFT™, where she helps software developers learn to choose what problems are worth solving and make better business-aligned decisions. Using the systems she developed coaching 500+ product leaders across the Bay Area, New York, and Seattle, she teaches builders how to navigate ambiguity and sharpen their judgment, the key skill in a world where AI is writing the code.
    Her background includes Harvard Business School and a track record of seeing around corners as a founder and product leader, and helping builders earn promotions, land dream roles, and think beyond execution into making smarter bets.

    Additional bio options: https://docs.google.com/document/d/12Y2qtSv0Rt6NGFvZZHWA7KIiL9WSasoqZL1C4QIkWrE/edit?usp=sharing

    View Oana’s profile
SolutionS ZONE

Next Steps AMA

Tech Lead

Tackling the role of Tech Lead

Dedicated sessions on how to take the next step in your career for tackling the role of a Tech Lead

+ More

Next Steps AMA

Tackling the role of Tech Lead

11:50 – 12:15

This session is suitable for:

Tech Lead

Dedicated sessions on how to take the next step in your career for tackling the role of a Tech Lead

  • FEATURING
    James Alexander
    Lead EngineerITV

    James Alexander is a Lead Engineer at ITVX, the UK’s fastest-growing streaming service, helping shape the architecture and delivery of its platform for over 45 million users. With more than two decades in software engineering, he focuses on building resilient systems and improving collaboration at scale. His recent work spans subscriptions, payments, and Minimum Viable Company initiatives. He promotes experimentation through A/B testing and Long Term Holdout Groups and leads on compliance, setting standards and guidance across ITV. James champions ITV’s neurodiversity network and working class group, and enjoys mentoring and supporting students and colleagues to achieve their potential.

    View James’s profile
  • Rui Posse
    Engineering ManagerRaaft

    Engineering Manager and Full-Stack engineer with 10+ years’ experience leading remote teams, Rui specialises in JavaScript/TypeScript, Vue.js and Node.js. Passionate about mentoring and team culture, he focuses on clear direction, modern engineering practices and pragmatic delivery that balances business impact with technical quality. He is passionate about tech communities and actively engages in sharing knowledge and supporting other engineers.

    View Rui’s profile
  • Simone Casciaroli
    Head of EngineeringKraken

    Simone Casciaroli is a technology leader who specialises in enabling autonomous teams to continuously and incrementally ship value to customers. Simone has spent the last two decades leading product and platform teams across startups and scale-ups (Now TV, Babylon Health, Onto, Doccla) with roles at the intersection of delivery, product, and technology. Simone has co-founded two health and personal development startups and recently joined Kraken Technology as Head of Engineering.

    View Simone’s profile
  • Humayra Hanif
    Lead Software Engineerthisdotsoftware

    With a decade of experience as a software engineer, Humayra has established herself as a Lead Software Engineer while concurrently co-founding Hulm Club – a Muslim-focussed community of visionaries and innovators.

    She has navigated various roles in engineering leadership at startups, accumulating extensive expertise along the way. Her expertise spans various sectors including finance, data, health, and retail marketing, where she has led teams to consistently deliver innovative solutions.

    Outside of her professional pursuits, Humayra actively engages as a writer, speaker, and mentor, contributing to the growth and diversity of the tech community. Her overarching objective remains focused on leveraging technology to drive positive change on a global scale.

    View Humayra’s profile

Demo

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

Live demo: CircleCI

Explore solutions for your technical issues.

+ More

Demo

Live demo: CircleCI

12:35 – 12:39

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Sponsored by

CircleCI Logo LeadDev

Explore solutions for your technical issues.

Make the most of your breaks with the demo stage sessions, where leading tech providers will showcase their innovative solutions in informative and concise presentations. Each carefully curated 10 minute demo will show the very best engineering solutions available.

Demo

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

Live demo: Frontegg

Explore solutions for your technical issues.

+ More

Demo

Live demo: Frontegg

12:40 – 12:45

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Sponsored by

Frontegg LeadDev

Explore solutions for your technical issues.

Make the most of your breaks with the demo stage sessions, where leading tech providers will showcase their innovative solutions in informative and concise presentations. Each carefully curated 10 minute demo will show the very best engineering solutions available.

Solution Talk

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

Solutions stage talk by Span

Sponsor-led 10-minute talks highlighting tools and solutions for real-world engineering problems.

+ More

Solution Talk

Solutions stage talk by Span

12:50 – 12:54

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Sponsored by

Span LeadDev

Join these 10-minute talks to explore how our partners are helping teams tackle real-world engineering challenges. Each session shares practical examples, lessons learned, and insights into the decisions behind the solutions — giving you ideas you can take back to your own teams and systems.

Solution Talk

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

Solutions stage talk by Chainguard

Sponsor-led 10-minute talks highlighting tools and solutions for real-world engineering problems.

+ More

Solution Talk

Solutions stage talk by Chainguard

12:55 – 13:00

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Sponsored by

Chainguard LeadDev

Join these 10-minute talks to explore how our partners are helping teams tackle real-world engineering challenges. Each session shares practical examples, lessons learned, and insights into the decisions behind the solutions — giving you ideas you can take back to your own teams and systems.

Demo

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

Live demo: Vercel

Explore solutions for your technical issues.

+ More

Demo

Live demo: Vercel

13:05 – 13:09

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Sponsored by

Explore solutions for your technical issues.

Make the most of your breaks with the demo stage sessions, where leading tech providers will showcase their innovative solutions in informative and concise presentations. Each carefully curated 10 minute demo will show the very best engineering solutions available.

Demo

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

Live demo: Coder

Explore solutions for your technical issues.

+ More

Demo

Live demo: Coder

13:10 – 13:15

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Sponsored by

Coder LeadDev

Explore solutions for your technical issues.

Make the most of your breaks with the demo stage sessions, where leading tech providers will showcase their innovative solutions in informative and concise presentations. Each carefully curated 10 minute demo will show the very best engineering solutions available.

Solution Talk

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

Solutions stage talk by Capital One

Sponsor-led 10-minute talks highlighting tools and solutions for real-world engineering problems.

+ More

Solution Talk

Solutions stage talk by Capital One

13:20 – 13:24

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Sponsored by

Capital One

Join these 10-minute talks to explore how our partners are helping teams tackle real-world engineering challenges. Each session shares practical examples, lessons learned, and insights into the decisions behind the solutions — giving you ideas you can take back to your own teams and systems.

Solution Talk

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

Solutions stage talk by Temporal

Sponsor-led 10-minute talks highlighting tools and solutions for real-world engineering problems.

+ More

Solution Talk

Solutions stage talk by Temporal

13:25 – 13:30

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Sponsored by

Temporal LeadDev

Join these 10-minute talks to explore how our partners are helping teams tackle real-world engineering challenges. Each session shares practical examples, lessons learned, and insights into the decisions behind the solutions — giving you ideas you can take back to your own teams and systems.

Demo

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

Live demo: Cloudflare

Explore solutions for your technical issues.

+ More

Demo

Live demo: Cloudflare

13:35 – 13:39

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Sponsored by

Cloudflare LeadDev

Explore solutions for your technical issues.

Make the most of your breaks with the demo stage sessions, where leading tech providers will showcase their innovative solutions in informative and concise presentations. Each carefully curated 10 minute demo will show the very best engineering solutions available.

Demo

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

Live demo: Tailscale

Explore solutions for your technical issues.

+ More

Demo

Live demo: Tailscale

13:40 – 13:45

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Sponsored by

Explore solutions for your technical issues.

Make the most of your breaks with the demo stage sessions, where leading tech providers will showcase their innovative solutions in informative and concise presentations. Each carefully curated 10 minute demo will show the very best engineering solutions available.

Solution Talk

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

Solutions stage talk by Svitla

Sponsor-led 10-minute talks highlighting tools and solutions for real-world engineering problems.

+ More

Solution Talk

Solutions stage talk by Svitla

13:50 – 13:54

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Sponsored by

Svitla Systems LeadDev

Join these 10-minute talks to explore how our partners are helping teams tackle real-world engineering challenges. Each session shares practical examples, lessons learned, and insights into the decisions behind the solutions — giving you ideas you can take back to your own teams and systems.

Solution Talk

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

Solutions stage talk by Testkube

Sponsor-led 10-minute talks highlighting tools and solutions for real-world engineering problems.

+ More

Solution Talk

Solutions stage talk by Testkube

13:55 – 14:00

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Sponsored by

Testkube LeadDev

Join these 10-minute talks to explore how our partners are helping teams tackle real-world engineering challenges. Each session shares practical examples, lessons learned, and insights into the decisions behind the solutions — giving you ideas you can take back to your own teams and systems.

Demo

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

Live demo: Bitrise

Explore solutions for your technical issues.

+ More

Demo

Live demo: Bitrise

14:05 – 14:09

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Sponsored by

Bitrise LeadDev

Explore solutions for your technical issues.

Make the most of your breaks with the demo stage sessions, where leading tech providers will showcase their innovative solutions in informative and concise presentations. Each carefully curated 10 minute demo will show the very best engineering solutions available.

Demo

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

Live demo: Unblocked

Explore solutions for your technical issues.

+ More

Demo

Live demo: Unblocked

14:10 – 14:15

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Sponsored by

Unblocked x LeadDev

Explore solutions for your technical issues.

Make the most of your breaks with the demo stage sessions, where leading tech providers will showcase their innovative solutions in informative and concise presentations. Each carefully curated 10 minute demo will show the very best engineering solutions available.

Next Steps AMA

Experienced Manager•New Manager•Tech Lead

Making the leap to Engineering Manager

Dedicated sessions on how to take the next step in your career for making the leap to Engineering Manager

+ More

Next Steps AMA

Making the leap to Engineering Manager

14:35 – 15:00

This session is suitable for:

Experienced Manager New Manager Tech Lead

Dedicated sessions on how to take the next step in your career for making the leap to Engineering Manager

  • FEATURING
    Amélie Thery
    Senior Engineering ManagerPrima

    Amélie is a passionate and empathetic leader. She aims to build resilient and high-performing teams, led by caring and high-performing individuals. She is French and lives in London, and currently works for Prima, the leading Italian digital insurance company.

    View Amélie’s profile
  • Aaron Moses
    Software Engineering Team LeadBBC
    View Aaron’s profile
  • Simone Casciaroli
    Head of EngineeringKraken

    Simone Casciaroli is a technology leader who specialises in enabling autonomous teams to continuously and incrementally ship value to customers. Simone has spent the last two decades leading product and platform teams across startups and scale-ups (Now TV, Babylon Health, Onto, Doccla) with roles at the intersection of delivery, product, and technology. Simone has co-founded two health and personal development startups and recently joined Kraken Technology as Head of Engineering.

    View Simone’s profile
  • Michael Tempest
    Senior Engineering Team LeadSpendesk

    Michael is a Senior Engineering Team Lead at Spendesk. He is passionate about getting people to work in the best way for them, and encouraging trust and open honest communication. He often pushes changes and experiments to test and learn quickly how a team should work, and makes sure the team are invested and feeding into those changes throughout the journey.

    In his free time, Michael enjoys listening to music, tinkering with new tech and watching movies/anime with his family.

    View Michael ‘s profile
  • Theo Nicolaou
    Front End Engineering ManagerITV

    Theo is an Engineering Manager in the Viewer Technology department at ITV. He has a background in front-end development, and uses his expertise to grow and lead teams working on the ITVX streaming platform. Outside of work he can be found learning the ropes of parenting, laughing/crying about Spurs and following the F1 racing.

    View Theo’s profile

Meet-up Panel

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

Building the LeadDev community: A meet-ups AMA

Discover how to engage with the global LeadDev engineering leadership community.

+ More

Meet-up Panel

Building the LeadDev community: A meet-ups AMA

14:35 – 15:00

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Curious about how LeadDev meet-ups run around the world, or thinking about starting one where you live?

Join current LeadDev meetup organisers for a live AMA on how the meetup programme works, what it’s really like to run a local community, and how you can get involved.

Whether you’re interested in launching a meet-up, speaking, sponsoring, or supporting local organisers, this session will show you how the LeadDev community comes to life, and how you can be part of it.

Find out how you can get involved:

  • Become an organizing host
  • Deliver a talk
  • Sponsor a venue
  • Volunteer to support
  • FEATURING
    Séverin Bruhat
    Software Engineering ManagerTrustpilot

    Sev is a Software Engineering Manager at Trustpilot in Edinburgh, UK. He’s passionate about building effective teams and empowering individuals, leveraging his technical expertise to guide development while fostering a collaborative work environment. When he’s not leading engineering teams, Sev enjoys blogging, playing guitar and spending time with his family and friends.

    View Séverin’s profile
  • Elvira Khamsin
    Engineering ManagerMojang Studios, Microsoft

    A girl boss, supporter of females, an immigrant also with 15 years experience in the IT business, and with a strong engineering background. After being in the industry for many years, she noticed so few women and  wanted to find out why. It turned out that women are not supported to even enter the industry. So she became a women’s employee resource group leader and self-esteem mentor to encourage women to speak and celebrate their achievements—one of the most respected #IamRemarkable facilitators (top 100 from 3000).

    View Elvira’s profile
  • Alisa Tikhova
    Senior Engineering Managereyeo GmbH

    Alisa Tikhova is a senior technical leader with 15+ years of experience working at the intersection of technology, leadership, and complex systems. Her work focuses on human literacy — how differences in communication, feedback, and decision-making shape outcomes in senior teams, and how leadership choices influence systems as they scale.

    View Alisa’s profile
  • Ferit Topcu
    Senior Manager, Engineering ManagementZenjob SE

    Ferit Topcu is a Berlin-based Engineering Manager at Zenjob SE, where he leads the Mobile & Marketing Platform Team. With over a decade of software engineering expertise, he’s passionate about exploring AI’s intersection with current engineering roles, its impact on the future of work and React Native. Known for his humor, often derived from his adventures raising three kids, Ferit brings authenticity and humanity to technical leadership. As an active community contributor, he is co-host of the LeadDev Meetup in Berlin.

    View Ferit’s profile
  • Ishaan Singh
    Content and Community Manager

    Ishaan works closely with our audience to curate content for software engineering leaders to address their pain points and help them become more effective in their roles. Ishaan explores new topical themes for future content and exciting new formats for its delivery to drive engagement across our platform.

    She’s recently started leading on the global rollout of LeadDev meetups and other community initiatives.

    View Ishaan’s profile

Demo

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

Live demo: Honeycomb

Explore solutions for your technical issues.

+ More

Demo

Live demo: Honeycomb

15:10 – 15:15

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Sponsored by

Honeycomb Logo - LeadDev

Explore solutions for your technical issues.

Make the most of your breaks with the demo stage sessions, where leading tech providers will showcase their innovative solutions in informative and concise presentations. Each carefully curated 10 minute demo will show the very best engineering solutions available.

Demo

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

Live demo: Harness

Explore solutions for your technical issues.

+ More

Demo

Live demo: Harness

15:10 – 15:15

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Sponsored by

Harness LeadDev

Explore solutions for your technical issues.

Make the most of your breaks with the demo stage sessions, where leading tech providers will showcase their innovative solutions in informative and concise presentations. Each carefully curated 10 minute demo will show the very best engineering solutions available.

Demo

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

Live demo: Incident

Explore solutions for your technical issues.

+ More

Demo

Live demo: Incident

15:25 – 15:30

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Sponsored by

Explore solutions for your technical issues.

Make the most of your breaks with the demo stage sessions, where leading tech providers will showcase their innovative solutions in informative and concise presentations. Each carefully curated 10 minute demo will show the very best engineering solutions available.

Demo

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

Live demo: Retool

Explore solutions for your technical issues.

+ More

Demo

Live demo: Retool

15:25 – 15:30

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Sponsored by

Retool LeadDev

Explore solutions for your technical issues.

Make the most of your breaks with the demo stage sessions, where leading tech providers will showcase their innovative solutions in informative and concise presentations. Each carefully curated 10 minute demo will show the very best engineering solutions available.

Next Steps AMA

Staff+•Tech Lead

Preparing for the role of Principal Engineer

Dedicated sessions on how to take the next step in your career for preparing for the role of a Principal Engineer

+ More

Next Steps AMA

Preparing for the role of Principal Engineer

16:20 – 16:45

This session is suitable for:

Staff+ Tech Lead

Dedicated sessions on how to take the next step in your career for preparing for the role of a Principal Engineer

  • FEATURING
    Steven Withey
    Principal Security EngineerASOS.com

    Steven Withey is a Principal Security Engineer at ASOS.com.

    View Steven’s profile
  • Michael Tweed
    Principal Software EngineerSkyscanner

    Michael is currently a Principal Software Engineer at Skyscanner where he is responsible for leading their Mobile Platform squads. He also has a keen interest in Mobile Observability and Data Production, and is helping drive Skyscanner’s long-term vision in these areas.

    View Michael ‘s profile
  • Simone Casciaroli
    Head of EngineeringKraken

    Simone Casciaroli is a technology leader who specialises in enabling autonomous teams to continuously and incrementally ship value to customers. Simone has spent the last two decades leading product and platform teams across startups and scale-ups (Now TV, Babylon Health, Onto, Doccla) with roles at the intersection of delivery, product, and technology. Simone has co-founded two health and personal development startups and recently joined Kraken Technology as Head of Engineering.

    View Simone’s profile
  • Nayana Shetty
    Principal EngineerThe Lego Group

    Nayana Shetty is a Principal Engineer at the Lego Group. The Lego Group is going through a massive digital transformation and she is helping with the architecture and engineering practices especially in the Ecommerce, Marketing and Channels technology. Over the years, she has led teams building products and tools that help organizations with site reliability and getting on the devops journey. Starting her career as a Quality Engineer she is passionate about building quality into products from the start rather than an afterthought and creating a culture of quality using devops practices within teams.

    View Nayana’s profile

The Big Debate

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

What will AI-accelerated engineering teams actually look like?

The Big Debate: Engineering at the edge of AI explores how AI is reshaping engineering teams. Industry leaders discuss how team structures, roles, and skills may evolve as AI accelerates development, examining the rise of cross-disciplinary engineers and how organisations may need to rethink hiring, career paths, and team design.

+ More

The Big Debate

What will AI-accelerated engineering teams actually look like?

16:20 – 17:00

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

AI is reshaping how software gets built, but what does that mean for the size, structure, and composition of engineering teams? As AI tools reduce certain types of work while amplifying others, long-held assumptions about team design are being challenged.

Will we need fewer engineers – or simply different ones? Does the rise of “product engineers” who span disciplines make traditional role boundaries obsolete? And how should organisations rethink hiring, career paths, and team topology in an AI-accelerated world?

Join this discussion as we bring together engineering leaders with differing perspectives on what the future shape of engineering teams will be. Expect thought-provoking conversation, as well as a clear-eyed look at what’s changing and how industry experts are preparing for it.

Discussions include:

  • How AI changes team size, composition, and structure
  • The rise (or not) of the “product engineer”
  • What skills will matter most in AI-native teams
  • How to redesign roles without destabilising delivery

Becoming a Contributor AMA

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

Become a contributor AMA

Join the LeadDev content team to learn how to become a future speaker, pitch ideas, or write articles.

+ More

Becoming a Contributor AMA

Become a contributor AMA

18:15 – 18:40

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Want to contribute to LeadDev but don’t know how?

Then join the LeadDev’s content team in one of these relaxed AMA sessions where they’ll be on hand to answer questions about how you can get involved.

Come along if you’re interested in speaking on stage or writing an article for us, and we’ll share the secrets of crafting winning speaker submissions and effective article proposals.

  • FEATURING
    Melinda Seckington
    Fractional EM, Coach ; TrainerLearn Build Share

    Melinda Seckington is a trainer and coach, working with engineering teams and leaders to improve their communication, management and collaboration skills. She previously was an engineering manager at companies such as the Wikimedia Foundation and FutureLearn, where she focused on creating great internal engineering cultures. She’s an international conference speaker and has spoken at over 50 conferences, covering topics from good management practices to becoming a better speaker.

    View Melinda’s profile
  • Scott Carey
    Editor in ChiefLeadDev

    Scott Carey is the Editor in Chief at LeadDev. An experienced technology journalist, he has covered software development for Computerworld, CIO, and InfoWorld before joining LeadDev.

    View Scott’s profile
  • Ishaan Singh
    Content and Community Manager

    Ishaan works closely with our audience to curate content for software engineering leaders to address their pain points and help them become more effective in their roles. Ishaan explores new topical themes for future content and exciting new formats for its delivery to drive engagement across our platform.

    She’s recently started leading on the global rollout of LeadDev meetups and other community initiatives.

    View Ishaan’s profile
  • Ruth Yarnit
    CEO & Co-founderLeadDev

    Ruth Yarnit co-founded White October Events with Dave Fletcher in 2013 to run human-centred events for the tech industry. The White October Events team creates content and conferences for the leaders and changemakers in software engineering teams around the world, developing their tech, team and tools to advance their businesses. Lead Dev is their flagship event with conferences in London, New York, Berlin and San Francisco. Ruth is interested in human beings and teams, both in her own business and in the wider tech industry. Outside of work she is particularly interested in two small human beings, aged 1 and 3.

    View Ruth’s profile
Leading your Organization stage

Arrival and coffee

Talk

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

Welcome to Day 2 of LDX3 London 2026

Host’s opening address.

+ More

Talk

Welcome to Day 2 of LDX3 London 2026

09:00 – 09:05

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Host’s opening address.

  • FEATURING
    Meri Williams
    CTO, NED & AdvisorChromeRose

    Meri is an experienced CTO and leader of technology organisations. They particularly enjoy helping others to level up as technical leaders and managers of organizations by working as a CTO coach and tech advisor / NED to various companies in this capacity through micro-consultancy ChromeRose.

    They have led teams ranging in size from 30 to 300, in a range of organizations from Procter & Gamble, to the Government Digital Service, award-winning online print company MOO, mobile-first challenger bank Monzo and patient-inspired AI-driven rare disease treatment discovery company Healx, amongst others.

    Together with their wife, they run the micro-charity One Goes Up, which supports young women and non-binary folks in pursuing STEM education and careers.

    View Meri’s profile

Talk

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

What does a CTO even do?

A reverse-engineering framework to help engineering leaders broaden impact, break growth ceilings, and develop the skills required for senior technical leadership.

+ More

Talk

What does a CTO even do?

14:35 – 15:00

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Many EMs and Directors struggle to understand how to drive their own career and personal growth, this session seeks to use the destination as a way to reverse engineer the path to personal growth.

Many EMs and Directors are type-cast into a single area of excellence, whether this is people management, technical operations, or some other thing. This can lead to an artificial ceiling on your own growth, you know how to do this one thing so well that you fall back on it too often, and you may find that roles that you aspire to evade your reach, that you’re overlooked in favour of others. In my experience this can be overcome by not asking what you need to learn, but instead asking what those who have those roles further in your career path are doing, and then to reverse engineer the path to that destination by looking at which skills gaps exist for you today.

I use a simple framework for this, a set of a few questions that will help show what other aspects of your current role you can start developing. To those managers I’ve mentored in the past, these questions have unlocked self-learning and drive, and helped accelerate their growth and steepen career trajectory, it’s all very accessible as a set of concepts, and applicable to any manager from those starting their people management career through to those at Director level, and I hope those above this level have already figured this out.

This talk is also applicable of Staff+ IC levels, as a lot of the basics are directly transferrable to IC leadership skills too.

Key takeaways

Five key questions are used to highlight areas for you to focus your learning:

  • Do we have the right team?
  • Do we have the right technology?
  • Do we have the right product vision?
  • Do we have the right balance between innovation and liability?
  • Do we have the right product <> market fit?
  • FEATURING
    Dee Kitchen
    VP, EngineeringGrafana Labs

    An engineer since 1996 and a people and project leader since 2005, Dee is a deeply technical senior leader who stays hands-on with technical direction while maintaining a strong commitment to developing engineers and engineering managers. Dee focuses on ensuring teams have both the right technology and the right support to successfully deliver on their mission.

    Over the past decade, Dee’s technical work has centered on observability, distributed databases, and privacy at Grafana Labs, as well as security products at Cloudflare, including firewalls, denial-of-service protection, traffic matching, and end-user protection. Alongside this work, Dee has led with a strong emphasis on mental health and wellbeing, diversity, and the personal growth of direct reports.

    View Dee’s profile

Talk

Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

The Staff Engineer’s playbook: Intellectual shift to systemic impact

A practical framework for making the Staff Engineer leap, shifting from solving tasks to defining strategy and delivering lasting systemic impact.

+ More

Talk

The Staff Engineer’s playbook: Intellectual shift to systemic impact

15:35 – 16:00

This session is suitable for:

Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

The jump to Staff IC is a fundamental shift. It requires you to become both an exceptional problem-solver and an organisational direction-setter. Learn the framework to make this intellectual leap.

The transition to a Staff IC role is often vaguely defined, yet it requires a fundamental intellectual shift. You must progress from expertly solving assigned problems to rigorously defining and architecting the solution to the most critical systemic, high-leverage problems – thereby setting the technical strategy. This talk introduces a rigorous, actionable framework, derived from intensive research and deep-dive interviews with Staff+ leaders at Monzo, to codify the true intellectual shift required to reach senior IC positions.

The methodology is directly inspired by my own experience earning a PhD, where the necessary approach, drive, and passion for defining the *unsolved* problem are identical.

It focuses on the bias for action and proactive ownership of the intellectual pipeline.

I’ll talk to how I use this methodology to identify high-impact Staff work by pursuing an organisational playbook: a high-conviction, principled argument for systemic change. This involves navigating four distinct phases:

1. The Research Gap 🔎:

Systematically surveying the organisation (e.g., Operations) to find critical ‘open loops’ and opportunities that significantly impact the business.

2. The Conviction 💪:

Developing T-Shaped authority and cross-domain empathy to define the correct, often difficult, architectural solution, turning a simple problem into a strategic mandate.

3. The Validation & Alignment 🤝:

Gaining cross-functional adoption by acting as the technically accountable strategic partner (the “PM’s Best Friend”), proactively steering product and engineering decisions.

4. The Multiplication 🌳:

Scaling impact by executing the strategy through others and deliberately building a Coaching Tree of future Staff Engineers.Using a real-world case study, how we architected the solution to a critical scheduling ‘open loop’ in our Operations platform, we will provide practical lessons on turning deep technical insights into lasting organisational leverage.

Key takeaways

  • Proactive Thesis Development: Learn how to systematically identify systemic “”open loops”” and use a bias for action to propose a principled, architectural solution (Conviction).
  • T-Shaped Authority: Understand how to use core domain mastery, combined with broad product and engineering context, to build technical opinions that command influence.
  • The PM’s Best Friend: Master the skill of cross-functional Validation & Alignment, ensuring your strategic proposals are adopted and proactively guide critical product decisions.
  • The Multiplier Effect: Understand how to structure strategic work to explicitly foster the growth and technical leadership development of others as a core Staff responsibility.
  • FEATURING
    Anna Selway
    Lead Analytics EngineerMonzo

    Anna’s journey into data and technology was unconventional. Initially trained as a classical singer, she became fascinated by the intersection of traditional music theory and computer science, specifically the idea of computationally extracting musical features based on traditional theory – such as harmony and rhythm – to calculate and recommend musical similarity.

    This led to a sharp pivot into a PhD, where she learnt to be resourceful, analyse different types of data, and build her own tools to conduct her research.

    Towards the end of her PhD, Anna joined a local tech company, solving technical customer issues. However, her passion truly ignited as she started exploring the entire tech stack. She fell in love with data-driven decision-making and moved into engineering and analytics.

    View Anna’s profile

Morning Break

Talk

Experienced Manager•New Manager•Tech Lead

Reading the game: Mental skills for high-performing engineering teams

A relatable look at how reading team dynamics, stress signals, and motivation unlocks stronger performance than technical skill alone.

+ More

Talk

Reading the game: Mental skills for high-performing engineering teams

11:40 – 12:05

This session is suitable for:

Experienced Manager New Manager Tech Lead

A knee injury turned me from player to coach. Watching from the sidelines taught me that understanding how people work matters more than technical skills alone.

Two years ago, a serious knee injury stopped me from playing sports. Instead of losing contact with my over-30s women’s football team whilst I recovered, I volunteered to coach from the sidelines—something I’d never done before. Suddenly, I was watching the same game from a completely different angle.

On the pitch, I’d naturally lead by example and being a good team player. From the sidelines, I started seeing the whole picture and all the people interacting with each other: Who goes quiet when they make a mistake versus who gets visibly frustrated? Who needs a confidence boost before they’ll attempt something challenging? Who plays better with direct instructions versus space to be creative? Who says they are fine but actually are struggling inside?

In my work life I’d focused on balancing teams with skills, experience and temperaments but hadn’t consciously considered the psychology of teams. When I started to do this with my sport team the parallels to motivating engineering teams hit me immediately.
Sports coaches often say “”the game is 80% mental and 20% physical.”” If you relate this to software engineering, we are saying that performance of a team is 20% technical skills and 80% mental skills. Yet in attempting to improve teams we are regularly focusing on the technical skills and process improvements.

This talk is about learning to “”read the game””—to observe your team as a whole and the individual parts at the same time, and the importance of them understanding about each other.

The best teams aren’t just technically capable—they understand each other.

Key takeaways

  • Learn why observing behavioural patterns in your team members is important
  • Understand why creating psychological safety for people to say “I’m having a tough time today” makes teams stronger, not weaker
  • Discover practical techniques for helping team members understand each other’s stress signals, motivations, and working styles
  • Learn why a plan should be aligned to the strengths and weaknesses of the team
  • FEATURING
    Cathy Pank
    Engineering LeadSnappet

    Cathy is an Engineering Lead at Snappet, an edtech company in the Netherlands. Originally from the UK, she’s spent the last decade working in the Netherlands and earlier a year in Spain. With 30 years in IT spanning roles between developer and CTO, she’s learned that technical skills alone don’t make teams perform well.

    A serious knee injury two years ago paused her playing field hockey and football but started her coaching journey from the sidelines. This shift revealed insights about team dynamics and psychological safety that enhanced how she leads engineering teams.

    Cathy is passionate about coaching, continuous learning, and showing up authentically at work.

    View Cathy’s profile

Talk

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

Mentoring that actually changes careers

A practical, human take on mentoring that actually helps people grow, by sharing real experience and honest guidance.

+ More

Talk

Mentoring that actually changes careers

11:05 – 11:30

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Mentoring isn’t coaching or teaching. Learn how to find mentors who genuinely invest in your growth, and how to mentor others by sharing real experience.

Last year, a recent graduate approached me at a tech conference. She was working at a convenience store kiosk, running their systems, handling post office services, and onboarding new staff. She wanted to break into tech but couldn’t get interviews. Within months of working together, she landed her first paid job in tech.

What made it work wasn’t magic. It was seeing transferable skills she’d dismissed as “just retail.” It was rewriting her CV to show what she actually did. It was being direct about which unpaid coding projects were worth her time and which were draining energy she needed elsewhere.

This is what mentoring actually is: sharing your lived experience to guide someone’s growth. It’s not coaching (asking questions), sponsoring (taking action on their behalf), or teaching (transferring knowledge). Early in my mentoring journey, I got this wrong. I kept asking coaching questions when someone needed practical examples from my experience. They disengaged. I learned that mentoring means being direct about what you’ve seen and done, not performing neutrality.

As an engineering manager leading a distributed team across three countries, I’ve relied heavily on my own mentors and connected team members with mentors outside our immediate group. I’ve seen what works from both sides.

This talk covers practical approaches to finding mentors beyond formal programs (peer mentors, next-level career mentors, reverse mentors) and how to build relationships that go beyond surface advice. You’ll learn how to mentor effectively: seeing potential others miss, sharing experience directly, and knowing when someone needs a mentor versus a coach. Through real stories from both sides, you’ll leave with concrete next steps.

Key takeaways

  • Recognize the difference between mentoring, coaching, sponsoring, and teaching and know when each is needed
  • Find mentors who genuinely invest in your growth, not ones checking boxes
  • Mentor effectively by sharing lived experience directly, not hiding behind coaching questions
  • FEATURING
    Lenni Ojala
    Senior Engineering ManagerRELEX Solutions

    Lenni leads a distributed team building mobile apps, backend services, and integrations for retail store operations. After 20+ years in tech, mentors have been their first call when navigating challenges. They organize a 4,000-member tech community for underrepresented people and actively mentor others.

    View Lenni’s profile

Lunch Break

Talk

Session to be announced

Talk details coming soon…

+ More

Talk

Session to be announced

17:05 – 17:30

Talk details coming soon…

  • FEATURING
    Neha Batra
    VP of Engineering

    Neha Batra is a self-taught programmer that fell into leadership and found her calling. Formerly the VP of Engineering at GitHub, she led Product Engineering across the web, desktop, mobile, and cli and worked on key AI features like Copilot Code Review. Her passion lies in making the tech industry easier to break into and be productive, which is why she focuses her talks and blogs on tactical tips and tricks, like Facilitation 202, Managing your Mentorship, and Delegation.

    She enjoys foodie adventures, planning trips, and collecting national park magnets. If you want to hear her ramble on a topic, ask her about experimenting with manager processes and playbooks or how much she misses Miami and its cafecitos.

    View Neha’s profile

Talk

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

AI productivity at enterprise scale

Turning AI adoption into real productivity gains requires changing habits, building skills, and scaling learning across the entire organization.

+ More

Talk

AI productivity at enterprise scale

10:10 – 10:20

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Sponsored by

Skiller Whale LeadDev

Selecting and rolling out AI tools is the easy part. Changing behaviour, and levelling up productivity across an organisation has always been hard, and still is with AI. This talk will describe how the right approach to learning can help enterprise organisations improve their AI abilities, and realise the promised gains in productivity.

  • FEATURING
    Hywel Carver
    CTO-turned-FounderSkiller Whale

    Hywel wrote his first program in C aged 9. After graduating with an MEng from Cambridge, he dropped out of his PhD programme to co-found his first start-up. Today, Hywel is Skiller Whale’s Co-Founder and CEO. He runs a dinner club for CTOs, a podcast for tech leaders called ‘Primarily Context-Based’, and is designing and building his own 8-bit computer for playing Pong. In his 12+ year career, he’s been building and scaling start-ups. With Skiller Whale, he is drawing on that experience to solve the biggest problem he faced as a CTO: learning for engineering teams.

    View Hywel’s profile

Talk

Director+•Experienced Manager

Up and down the management track: Equalising your leadership style across the pressure of scale

A real-world guide to shifting your mindset and skills as you move between managing people, managers, and entire organizations.

  • Karen Lee Rigg Just Eat Takeaway.com
    Director of Engineering, Global Intelligence Platforms
+ More

Talk

Up and down the management track: Equalising your leadership style across the pressure of scale

13:50 – 14:15

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager

This talk is about the difference between being a manager, a manager of managers, and a manager of managers of managers.

Most management advice treats leadership as a linear ladder, but the reality is more like a series of “vibe shifts” that force you to reinvent yourself at every level. If you try to manage a Director the same way you managed a Junior Engineer, you’re going to fail—and probably burn out in the process.

In this talk, I’ll share what I’ve learned from the unique experience of moving up and down the management chain, from 1st-line lead to 3rd-line executive and back again. We’ll skip the theory and get into the messy reality of three distinct roles:

  • Managing ICs: Learning to stop “doing” and start “enabling” without losing your technical edge.
  • Managing Managers: How to coach for leadership instead of technical output, and how to tell if a team is healthy when you’re no longer in the day-to-day.
  • Managing Organizations: Using organizational design and strategy as your primary tools when you can no longer rely on personal relationships alone.

Whether you’re eyeing your first lead role or you’re a seasoned Director, you’ll leave with a better understanding of how to adjust your “flight altitude” and avoid the trap of using yesterday’s skills to solve today’s problems.

Key takeaways

  • Identify the “success traps” where habits from your previous level actually hinder your performance in a new role.
  • Learn how to audit a team’s health through layers of abstraction without micromanaging your managers.
  • Develop a framework for coaching leadership skills rather than just overseeing project delivery.
  • Understand why moving “down” the ladder can be a strategic move to sharpen your perspective and long-term impact.
  • FEATURING
    Karen Lee Rigg
    Director of Engineering, Global Intelligence PlatformsJust Eat Takeaway.com

    Karen is a Director of Engineering at Just Eat Takeaway.com, a leading global online food delivery marketplace, connecting consumers and partners to empower everyday convenience. Previously, Karen was a Director of Engineering at Permutive, a best in class audience platform for advertisers and publishers, and a Tech Lead at Thoughtworks, a leading global technology consultancy.

    Outside of work, she can be found rock climbing in the Peak District, snowboarding in the Alps and occasionally sailing in the Caribbean.

     

    View Karen’s profile

Afternoon Break

Talk

Session to be announced

Talk details coming soon…

+ More

Talk

Session to be announced

16:20 – 16:30

Sponsored by

Softwire x LeadDev

Talk details coming soon…

  • FEATURING
    Zoe Cunningham
    DirectorSoftwire

    Zoe is an award-winning lifelong technologist and currently works as a Director at Softwire, voted Best Large Company to Work for in 2023 & 2024. A seasoned professional speaker, author and film actor, she is the host of The Digital Lighthouse, a podcast for CTOs and tech leaders. With 15+ years of delivering talks, workshops, and hosting panels, she is skilled at connecting with audiences of all sizes. She has been a main conference host, introducing speakers and sharing key insights at events such as the BBC’s Develop conference and her speaking engagements span diverse venues, including Oxford University, the OECD in Paris, and the UK Treasury. Zoe has appeared as a news guest and presenter on major platforms including BBC One, BBC Worldwide, Sky News, Channel 4, and ITN.

    View Zoe’s profile

Talk

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

End of day wrap-up

Host’s closing remarks.

+ More

Talk

End of day wrap-up

17:10 – 17:20

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Host’s closing remarks.

  • FEATURING
    Meri Williams
    CTO, NED & AdvisorChromeRose

    Meri is an experienced CTO and leader of technology organisations. They particularly enjoy helping others to level up as technical leaders and managers of organizations by working as a CTO coach and tech advisor / NED to various companies in this capacity through micro-consultancy ChromeRose.

    They have led teams ranging in size from 30 to 300, in a range of organizations from Procter & Gamble, to the Government Digital Service, award-winning online print company MOO, mobile-first challenger bank Monzo and patient-inspired AI-driven rare disease treatment discovery company Healx, amongst others.

    Together with their wife, they run the micro-charity One Goes Up, which supports young women and non-binary folks in pursuing STEM education and careers.

    View Meri’s profile
Making technical choices stage

Arrival and coffee

Talk

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

Welcome to Day 2 of LDX3 London 2026

Host’s opening address.

+ More

Talk

Welcome to Day 2 of LDX3 London 2026

09:00 – 09:14

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Host’s opening address.

  • FEATURING
    Suhail Patel
    Principal EngineerMonzo

    Suhail is the Principal Engineer at Monzo focused on building the Core Banking and Infrastructure Platform. His role involves serving as a technical authority on Monzo’s infrastructure which spans over two thousand microservices and leverages key infrastructure components like Kubernetes, Cassandra, Kafka, Etcd and more. He focuses specifically in investigating deviant behaviour and ensuring services continue to work reliably in the face of a constantly shifting environment in the cloud.

    View Suhail’s profile

Talk

Experienced Manager•Tech Lead

Designing neuro-inclusive incident management

Learn how small, intentional changes to incident management reduce cognitive load, support neurodivergent engineers, and strengthen system reliability.

+ More

Talk

Designing neuro-inclusive incident management

10:55 – 11:20

This session is suitable for:

Experienced Manager Tech Lead

Incident response processes can disproportionately disadvantage neurodivergent engineers. This talk shows how small, intentional changes to incident management can reduce cognitive load, support neurodivergent engineers, and improve reliability for everyone.

When incidents happen, on-call engineers are expected to reason about complex systems under intense time pressure, ambiguity, and social stress. Yet most incident management practices quietly assume strong working memory, rapid context switching, comfort with implicit rules, and emotional resilience under impact escalation. Those assumptions disproportionately disadvantage neurodivergent engineers.

ADHD responders pay heavily for context switching and memory load. Autistic responders are forced to infer implicit expectations under stress. Anxious responders face amplified threat perception when escalation, severity, or stakeholder expectations are unclear. The current processes also increase operational risk for teams as a whole. Unclear ownership, emotional escalation, misunderstood decisions, mistaken actions, fragmented communication and missed handoffs are not just human problems; they are systemic problems.

This talk reframes incident management as a designed system, not just a runbook. If anything, the more complex and detailed a runbook is written, the quicker it gets out-of-sync, becomes inconsistent, and too overwhelming to read. Drawing on real incident patterns and leadership experience from various organisation sizes and structures as a neurodivergent engineer, this talk explores how cognitive load, ambiguity, and emotional pressure show up during incidents and how leaders can redesign response processes to be more predictable, explicit, and humane without slowing teams down.

Attendees will learn practical, low-cost changes they can make immediately: reducing cognitive complexity in runbooks and alert descriptions, making expectations explicit, eliminating backchannels (with a caveat), narrating visuals and metrics, defining severity by impact rather than emotion, allowing emotional processing (separately from execution), permission to slow down/have a break/hand over, designing clearer on-call and recovery practices, and building the incident management muscle memory through trainings, game days/hours and shadowings. These changes improve inclusion, decision-making, and system reliability at the same time.

Key takeaways

  • A new way to look at incident management as a socio-technical system with cognitive constraints
  • Concrete practices to reduce cognitive load during incidents
  • Leadership tools for building incident response skills across diverse teams and brains
  • FEATURING
    Dianing Yudono
    Career Coach

    Dianing Yudono is a neurodivergent software engineer and professional coach who helps technologists navigate career transitions, leadership challenges, and organisational change. Having experienced multiple role changes, reorgs, and the loss of her own support network, she learned how critical the right support can be. She now coaches engineers, designers, and managers to identify the support they need, regain confidence, and thrive in evolving roles.

    View Dianing’s profile

Morning Break

Talk

Experienced Manager•Tech Lead

Most MCP servers are collecting dust. How to avoid that.

How to design MCP servers that deliver the right context, stay secure, and actually get used in real workflows.

+ More

Talk

Most MCP servers are collecting dust. How to avoid that.

15:35 – 16:00

This session is suitable for:

Experienced Manager Tech Lead

Many MCP servers are built out of curiosity rather than necessity. In this talk, we’ll see how the team at Multiplayer approached building a production-grade MCP server and the hard lessons learned along the way to get AI the right data at the right time.

Today, many MCP servers are built to “connect AI to your systems”, often exposing too much data, too little intent, or unnecessary security risk. In this talk, we’ll start with one of the core pain points: giving AI coding tools access to high quality, system-specific data that was previously too fragmented or costly to assemble.

From there, we’ll explore why solving the data problem requires rethinking observability practices, how to design MCP servers that don’t inherit this problem, and why data collection is only half the equation: you also need agents that can act on that data.

This session is a candid look at what it takes to move beyond hype and build AI tools that are both useful and safe. Where less is more, context beats
completeness, and AI workflows fit naturally into existing developer workflows.

Key takeaways

  • Why “connect AI to everything” doesn’t work and the modern telemetry data problem
  • What AI agents actually need to move from assistants to autonomous tools
  • How observability practices must evolve (session-based collection, dynamic escalation, auto-correlation)
  • Practical MCP design principles that account for data quality, user intent, and security
  • The path to self-healing systems using AI agents to act on the “right data”

  • FEATURING
    Thomas Johnson
    Co-founder and CTO Multiplayer

    Thomas Johnson is the Co-founder and CTO at Multiplayer, with 30+ years of experience as an engineering leader and backend developer building large-scale distributed software (and robots!)

    View Thomas ‘s profile

Talk

Experienced Manager•Tech Lead

Your problem isn’t the monolith. It’s the data.

How disciplined data ownership and contracts prevent architectural decay and enable systems to evolve without traumatic rewrites.

+ More

Talk

Your problem isn’t the monolith. It’s the data.

16:10 – 16:35

This session is suitable for:

Experienced Manager Tech Lead

Every architecture tells a story, and most tragedies begin with messy data. This talk shows how clear ownership, contracts, and events can turn complexity into clarity and evolution into design.

We often blame the shape of a system for its troubles: “It’s the monolith,” or “We moved too slowly to microservices.” In practice, the rot sets in earlier and deeper. It begins when anyone can write to any table, when cross-domain joins sneak into hot paths, when lifecycle and retention rules are inconsistently applied, and when teams share a database but not a vocabulary. The result is a system that erodes from the inside out. Not because it is a monolith, but because ownership ends at the code and never reaches the data.

This talk argues that data must be the structuring force of architecture. We will journey with Penultimate Markets, a global marketplace that scaled from a single deployment to a distributed platform, and see how disciplined data ownership shaped every step. In the monolith phase, aggregates anchored transactional boundaries; write logic lived inside the owning domain; other teams consumed contract-based read models rather than reaching into tables. Architectural fitness functions made these rules executable: blocking cross-domain joins, enforcing expand/contract migrations, and validating event and read-model contracts continuously.

As the platform expanded, different domains began to pull outward. Search needed low-latency regional scaling; tax required immutable records and long retention; payments demanded isolated failure domains and stricter SLAs. Instead of a flag day, the same data-first discipline guided decomposition. Seams defined by aggregates, events, and read models became extraction boundaries. Autonomy followed data ownership; duplication became intentional; consistency was managed with explicit choreography or orchestration rather than sprawling transactions.

The point is not to romanticize monoliths or glorify microservices. It is to show that architectures endure when teams align on data lifecycles, not just APIs. If you can define, defend, and evolve data boundaries, your monolith will remain modular longer, and your inevitable decompositions will be evolutionary, not traumatic. You leave with pragmatic techniques you can adopt on Monday: encode ownership, publish contracts, verify them in CI, and make migrations safe by design. Do this, and your system will grow with your business rather than against it.

Key takeaways

  • How to treat aggregates as transactional boundaries and keep writes local to the owning domain
  • How to replace table access with contract-based read models to decouple evolution
  • How to use events and process managers to coordinate cross-aggregate workflows without big transactions
  • How to enforce discipline with architectural fitness functions focused on data, not just code
  • How to recognize when data lifecycles and governance push you beyond the monolith and how to decompose along existing seams”
  • FEATURING
    Pramod Sadalage
    DirectorThoughtworks

    Pramod Sadalage is Director at ThoughtWorks leading the Modern Data Architecture service for North America, he enjoys the rare role of bridging the divide between database professionals and application developers. He is usually sent in to clients with particularly challenging data needs, which require new technologies and techniques. In the early 00’s he developed techniques to allow relational databases to be designed in an evolutionary manner based on version-controlled schema migrations. He is co-author of Software Architecture: The Hard Parts: Modern Trade-Off Analyses for Distributed Architectures, co-author author for Building Evolutionary Architectures: Automated Software Governance, co-author of Refactoring Databases: Evolutionary Database Design, co-author of NoSQL Distilled: A Brief Guide to the Emerging World of Polyglot Persistence, author of Recipes for Continuous Database Integration and continues to speak and write about the insights he and his clients learn.

    View Pramod’s profile
  • Prem Chandrasekaran
    Tech DirectorThoughtworks

    Prem is a technology leader and change agent with a solid track record of leading large technology teams and helping businesses tackle mission-critical challenges. Currently serving as the Market Tech Director at Thoughtworks, a global technology consulting company, he has close to 30 years of experience in leading software teams. He strives to enrich the lives of stakeholders and end-users while maintaining high internal and external quality. Passionate about the
    application of iterative methods and the use of open source software, Prem attempts to rapidly realize value. Over the past three decades, he has assisted a diverse range of clients across sectors such as financial services, online retail, education, and healthcare startups. His specialties include technical innovation, architecture, continuous delivery, agile/iterative transformation, and employee development.

    View Prem’s profile

Talk

Staff+•Tech Lead

Dojo’s leap from 90 clusters to one golden path

How a single golden path replaced massive platform sprawl, delivering self-service, safer defaults, and real operational leverage.

+ More

Talk

Dojo's leap from 90 clusters to one golden path

11:40 – 12:05

This session is suitable for:

Staff+ Tech Lead

A case study on taming extreme tech sprawl of 90 K8s clusters, 11 databases technologies, 4 SDLCs. I’ll share how our ‘One PR, One YAML’ tool, Orchestra, created one golden path to operational leverage.

How does tech sprawl happen? You wake up one day to find your organisation is running 90 Kubernetes clusters, supporting 11 different database technologies, and trying to manage 4 distinct, incompatible SDLCs. That was our reality. This is the case study of Dojo’s journey from chaos to centralisation.

The cost of this sprawl was enormous: disparate security implementations and reliability practices, and a developer experience full of friction. This talk details our “”Platform Leap”” on a strategic initiative to centralise by building the Dojo Creator Platform and treating our internal platform as a first-class product.

The catalyst for success was Orchestra: our ‘One PR, One YAML’ workload specification and CLI. This single, self-service abstraction became our “”golden path.”” It allowed us to enforce reliability, quality, and security standards by design, not by committee.

This platform leap solved our sprawl problem and delivered immense operational leverage. By enabling true self-service, we allowed our engineering organisation to scale, delivering more features with less friction and without a linear increase in platform team overhead.

Key takeaways

  • Learn how to quantify and communicate the high cost of tech sprawl (e.g., “90 clusters”).
  • See how a ‘One PR, One YAML’ abstraction (Orchestra) can drive platform adoption and developer self-service.
  • Understand how to enforce “golden paths” to consolidate sprawl and measurably improve reliability and security.
  • Gain a blueprint for achieving true operational leverage and scaling your engineering org efficiently.
  • FEATURING
    Ell Sullivan
    Senior Staff EngineerDojo

    Ell Sullivan is a Senior Staff Engineer at Dojo and a staff-plus technical leader based in London. He drives high-impact technical strategy and recently led the rollout of Dojo’s Centralized Infrastructure Platform, navigating complex organizational and engineering challenges to transform a bottlenecked DevOps model into a scalable, self-service, product-led platform.

    A trusted architectural advisor to VPs and senior engineering leaders, Ell defines the golden paths that unlock operational leverage across the organization. As Chair of the Engineering Forum, he amplifies this impact by scaling technical thinking and best practices across teams. He is a passionate mentor, a key contributor to senior talent hiring, and a proud father of three daughters.

    View Ell’s profile

Lunch Break

Talk

Experienced Manager•Tech Lead

Crowdsourcing platform engineering

How shared ownership and empathy-driven leadership can turn platform engineering into a collaborative effort that boosts delivery and developer experience.

+ More

Talk

Crowdsourcing platform engineering

12:35 – 13:00

This session is suitable for:

Experienced Manager Tech Lead

How Cash App built a culture of shared ownership in platform engineering–where empathy, collaboration, and visibility drive developer experience and delivery velocity.

Platform engineering often conjures images of large, specialized teams. But at Cash App, it began with volunteers–and eventually, with me as the first full-time Android Developer Experience (MDX) engineer. This talk explores how a grassroots, crowdsourced approach to platform engineering can scale from one motivated individual to an organization-wide culture of shared ownership and empathy-driven leadership.

Through real stories from Cash App’s Mobile Developer Experience and Release Automation teams, I’ll share how feature engineers contributed directly to developer tooling, while platform engineers stayed grounded by building product features. This created powerful feedback loops that improved collaboration, accelerated delivery, and increased build reliability across mobile teams.

Attendees will learn practical leadership patterns for enabling this kind of culture: embedding DX tooling in monorepos to lower contribution barriers, recognizing cross-team contributions publicly, running regular qualitative feedback sessions, and rotating engineers between platform and product work to build empathy and skill breadth.

In a world of AI and constrained resources, the ability to “do more with less” depends on trust, empowerment, and shared purpose. This talk shows how engineering leaders can intentionally cultivate those qualities–shifting platform engineering from a service function to a collective movement.

Whether you’re a tech lead, staff engineer, or manager, you’ll leave with repeatable strategies to:

  • Seed a culture of shared ownership and psychological safety
  • Encourage engineers to grow platform skills without burnout
  • Ground platform work in product realities
  • Recognize and sustain contributions visibly
  • Lead teams that are human-first, not AI-first

Key takeaways

  • How to build and sustain a culture of shared ownership in platform and developer experience work.
  • Leadership practices to enable empathy, visibility, and trust across technical teams.
  • Practical strategies to “do more with less” through collaboration and empowerment.
  • Methods to ground platform efforts in real product needs and avoid abstraction drift.
  • How to make human-first leadership a competitive advantage in an AI-first world.
  • FEATURING
    Marianna Budnikova
    Lead Staff Software EngineerBlock

    Marianna is a multipotentialite engineer and tech lead with a BS and MS in Computer Science. Her experience spans Android development, data science, machine learning, augmented reality, and developer experience. She believes the hardest part of software engineering isn’t code—it’s humans. At Cash App, she leads the Release Automation and Tooling Systems team, where she focuses on improving engineering culture to be more human-centered for both developers and customers. Previously, she worked at Microsoft and Dropbox. Marianna lives in Portland, Oregon, with her husband, parents, and three-year-old son.

    View Marianna’s profile

Talk

Experienced Manager

The mechanics of scaling: Why delivery slows as you grow, and what to do about it

Every organisation has its speed limits. When more effort starts producing fewer results, you’ve likely hit one. What drives speed has shifted, and so must your approach.

+ More

Talk

The mechanics of scaling: Why delivery slows as you grow, and what to do about it

10:05 – 10:30

This session is suitable for:

Experienced Manager

Every organisation has its speed limits. When more effort starts producing fewer results, you’ve likely hit one. What drives speed has shifted, and so must your approach.

In the early days of scaling, your organisation feels almost unstoppable. You think you may have cracked the code for success, and even start wondering if you should maybe write a book about it. But then the balance begins to shift. First slowly and almost imperceptibly, then faster and faster, until it feels like the whole thing is about to spin off the handle.

I have seen the same pattern repeat in very different environments. The details changed, but the slowdown always looked the same. At some point, execution just stopped being a convincing explanation. That’s when I came across systems thinking.

What I learned is that when issues keep repeating despite capable teams and good intentions, the problem is rarely people. It’s the structure of the system itself: the limits built into it, the stocks that quietly accumulate over time, and the feedback loops that shape behaviour whether we notice them or not.

In this talk, I will show how rising incidents, fragile systems, slower delivery and constant firefighting are often signs of hitting systemic limits rather than execution failure. We’ll look at how both your “good” stocks (product strength, customer base, team mastery) and your “bad” stocks (technical debt, team burnout, coordination complexity) are shaped by reinforcing and balancing loops, and why understanding what feeds those stocks, and what slows them down, can be critical to survival as you scale. I will also explain why pushing harder is almost always the wrong response to limits to growth, and how well-intentioned quick fixes can erode long-term resilience.

This talk helps make sense of why organisations behave the way they do as they scale. It shows how familiar problems often point to structural limits rather than execution gaps, and explains how to recognise when the system itself is shaping the outcome.

Key takeaways

  • You can’t hire your way out of a system problem.
  • Issues that keep coming back are usually structural, not something you can spot-fix.
  • Every organisation has speed limits. Scaling works better when you recognise them instead of fighting them.
  • Late or weak feedback isn’t feedback. It’s noise.
  • In complex systems, cause and effect are far apart. By the time you feel the problem, you are already reacting to the past.
  • FEATURING
    Maryia Tarpachova
    Senior Software EngineerOctopus Electroverse

    Maryia Tarpachova is a Senior Software Engineer at Octopus Electroverse. She taught herself to code during the pandemic, fitting 4am study sessions around an energetic toddler and her job at a human rights foundation.

    Before moving into software engineering, she worked across a range of sectors including non-profit and healthcare, where she began to notice the same organisational patterns resurfacing in very different environments. Discovering systems thinking gave her a way to make sense of those recurring dynamics. She is now exploring how understanding the underlying structure of a system, rather than just its visible problems, can help teams build resilience into how they scale and deliver software.

    View Maryia’s profile

Afternoon Break

Talk

Experienced Manager•New Manager

Accelerating sustainably with AI

Scaling AI coding across teams requires culture shifts, standards, documentation, and thoughtful sustainable engineering practices.

+ More

Talk

Accelerating sustainably with AI

15:10 – 15:35

This session is suitable for:

Experienced Manager New Manager

Sponsored by

incident.io

AI tools now write the majority of code at incident.io. Every engineer uses them, and the acceleration is real. But getting here was harder than anyone expected, and the hardest parts had nothing to do with the tools themselves.

I’ve spent the last year watching this shift across our engineering team. We went from early skepticism to a messy middle–some engineers seeing huge productivity boosts while others barely engaged–to eventually getting the whole team on board. It took real investment to get there, and just installing the tools was the easy part.

How do you maintain engineering standards when AI writes most of your code? How do you onboard new engineers when leaning on AI too early means they never learn the system? What do you do when half your team is flying and the other half feels left behind?

The ROI of almost all typical software tasks needs to be reconsidered. For example: we document our codebase more thoroughly than ever, because AI can’t follow conventions nobody wrote down. We’re codifying standards we kept in our heads for years so we can automate review. And we’ve learned that the time AI frees up might be its most valuable output — not to ship more, but to spend more time with the product, testing and scrutinising what’s being built rather than rushing to the next thing.

In this talk, I’ll share what worked, what didn’t, and what we still haven’t figured out. You’ll see how we closed the adoption gap across our team, the cultural norms we built around responsible use, and the uncomfortable trade-offs that come with going all-in. Everything you need if you want not only to go fast, but to keep going.

  • FEATURING
    Lawrence Jones
    Product Engineerincident.io

    Lawrence spent his early career at GoCardless as both SRE and product engineer, helping the company grow from start-up to unicorn. Having spent years working as a Principal SRE building an internal PaaS and helping GoCardless scale their services, Lawrence joined incident.io as employee #1 to build the incident response product he’d wished for over the hundreds of incidents he’d been involved in. Now his focus is on establishing the foundations for a world-class engineering team, and recently building the incident.io Status Pages and Catalog products.

    View Lawrence’s profile

Talk

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

End of day wrap-up

Host’s closing remarks.

+ More

Talk

End of day wrap-up

17:10 – 17:20

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Host’s closing remarks.

  • FEATURING
    Suhail Patel
    Principal EngineerMonzo

    Suhail is the Principal Engineer at Monzo focused on building the Core Banking and Infrastructure Platform. His role involves serving as a technical authority on Monzo’s infrastructure which spans over two thousand microservices and leverages key infrastructure components like Kubernetes, Cassandra, Kafka, Etcd and more. He focuses specifically in investigating deviant behaviour and ensuring services continue to work reliably in the face of a constantly shifting environment in the cloud.

    View Suhail’s profile
Building for production stage

Arrival and coffee

Talk

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

Welcome to Day 2 of LDX3 London 2026

Host’s opening address.

+ More

Talk

Welcome to Day 2 of LDX3 London 2026

09:00 – 09:14

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Host’s opening address.

  • FEATURING
    Sarah Wells
    Independent Technical Consultant & Author

    Sarah is a technology leader, consultant and conference speaker with a focus on engineering effectiveness, microservices, incident management, platform engineering, optimising for flow and technical strategy. She has over 20 years’ experience as a developer, principal engineer and tech director across product, platform, SRE and DevOps teams.

    She spent over a decade working at the Financial Times, as it transformed from 12 releases a year to more than 20,000, embracing autonomous empowered teams and adopting microservices, DevOps, containers and platform engineering.

    She is the author of the O’Reilly book Enabling Microservice Success: Managing Technical, Organizational and Cultural Challenges.

    View Sarah’s profile

Talk

Experienced Manager•New Manager•Tech Lead

Rebuilding the kitchen: Human connection in distributed engineering teams

Practical ways to rebuild trust, visibility, and human connection in remote teams by designing shared spaces, not adding more tools.

+ More

Talk

Rebuilding the kitchen: Human connection in distributed engineering teams

10:55 – 11:20

This session is suitable for:

Experienced Manager New Manager Tech Lead

Distributed teams don’t need more tools – they need shared spaces. This talk shares practical leadership patterns for rebuilding trust, visibility, and human connection through intentional social and collaboration spaces in remote engineering teams.

When teams went remote, we didn’t lose productivity or tools.
We lost the shared, informal spaces where trust, learning, and real connection used to form.

Distributed teams rarely fail loudly. They drift quietly.
Effort becomes invisible. New joiners miss context. Leaders sense something is wrong, but nothing is obviously broken.

In this talk, I’ll show how engineering leaders can intentionally rebuild those shared spaces in fully remote and cross-country teams. Not by adding more meetings, but by designing social and collaboration spaces that replace informal, in-between moments.

Using a simple metaphor of shared spaces, I’ll share practical leadership approaches for rebuilding trust, visibility, and human connection across time zones and cultures. All examples come from real experience leading distributed engineering teams through growth and structural change.

This is a practical, leadership-focused talk for managers who want their remote teams to feel connected, aligned, and human – not just productive.

Because culture isn’t lost in remote work.
It’s just no longer accidental.

Key takeaways

  • How to design shared social and collaboration spaces that replace informal, in-office moments in remote teams.
  • How to make work and effort visible without introducing micromanagement or extra meetings.
  • How to maintain trust and human connection across time zones and cultural differences.
  • How to intentionally scale team culture as distributed teams grow.
  • FEATURING
    Natalia Nazaruk
    Engineering Squad LeadKingfisher

    Natalia is an Engineering Squad Lead and mobile engineering leader with experience leading distributed, cross-country teams in large organisations. She focuses on building strong team culture, trust, and effective collaboration in remote-first environments. In her day-to-day work, she combines practical leadership patterns with a human-centred approach to engineering management. Natalia is active in engineering communities and regularly speaks at internal and external events, sharing real-world leadership lessons grounded in hands-on experience.

    View Natalia’s profile

Talk

Director+•Experienced Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

Lessons from 100 P0 incidents

Hard-won patterns for designing systems and leading teams to detect failures sooner, respond faster, and limit the blast radius.

+ More

Talk

Lessons from 100 P0 incidents

14:25 – 14:50

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Practical lessons from handling 100 P0 production incidents over 20 years, focusing on system design, incident response, observability, and leadership decisions that reduce impact and recovery time.

Over the past 20 years, I have been directly involved in handling more than 100 P0 production incidents across large-scale, distributed systems. These incidents included full outages, severe performance degradation, and data integrity failures, often under significant time pressure and business impact.

This talk shares the most important lessons learned from being on the front line of those incidents. Rather than walking through individual war stories, it focuses on the recurring technical and organizational patterns that consistently shaped outcomes, both good and bad.

I will explain how early system design decisions, alerting quality, ownership boundaries, and operational practices influence incident severity long before anything breaks. The talk also examines what actually helps teams stay effective during high-stress incidents and what tends to increase confusion, delay recovery or lead to burnout.

Drawing from real experience as a hands-on engineer and technical leader, this session offers practical guidance on improving incident response, building more resilient systems and leading teams through P0 situations with clarity and confidence. The goal is not to eliminate incidents entirely, but to reduce their impact and help teams respond better when failures inevitably occur.

Key takeaways

  1. Recognize recurring patterns behind high-severity production incidents.
  2. Design systems and alerts that surface problems earlier and more clearly.
  3. Improve incident response by reducing cognitive load during P0 events.
  4. Run incident reviews that lead to meaningful system and process changes.
  5. Lead teams through production failures without blame or burnout.
  • FEATURING
    Dileep Kumar Pandiya
    Principal EngineerZoomInfo

    Dileep Pandiya is a Principal Engineer and AI strategist with over 20 years of experience building scalable, enterprise-grade systems at Fortune 500 companies including ZoomInfo, Wayfair, Walmart, and IBM. At ZoomInfo he leads foundational engineering efforts that enhance reliability, AI-driven capabilities and data platform performance. Dileep regularly speaks at industry events, contributes to thought leadership on AI and distributed systems and mentors engineers worldwide.

    Beyond coding and architecture, Dileep is passionate about sharing knowledge, whether it’s through speaking at conferences or writing about the future of AI and automation. His work has been recognized through industry awards, published research, and thought leadership in enterprise software.

    View Dileep ‘s profile

Morning Break

Talk

Experienced Manager•New Manager•Tech Lead

400 Tech Leads. Same problems. None of them technical.

Why tech leads struggle despite strong technical skills, and the small leadership shifts that remove overload, friction, and self-doubt.

+ More

Talk

400 Tech Leads. Same problems. None of them technical.

17:05 – 17:30

This session is suitable for:

Experienced Manager New Manager Tech Lead

After training and coaching 400+ tech leads, one thing is clear: their hardest problems aren’t technical. This talk explores the real blockers and what helps.

After training and coaching more than 400 tech leads across different companies, industries, and levels of experience, one pattern keeps repeating: when tech leads struggle, it’s rarely a technical gap.

In this talk, Anemari Fiser shares the most common challenges tech leads bring into coaching sessions and why “getting better technically” almost never fixes them. Instead, the real blockers show up as overload, unclear expectations, ownership confusion, and assumed alignment. These patterns consistently lead to slow decisions, delivery friction, and burned-out tech leads, even in teams with strong engineers and modern tooling.

Drawing from real coaching sessions, training group discussions, and concrete case studies, this talk explores where tech leads consistently get stuck. For each pattern, it looks at what the tech lead thought the problem was, what it turned out to be, and the small but meaningful shifts that helped them move forward: from rethinking 1-on-1s, to making expectations explicit, to letting go without losing trust.

This isn’t a talk about abstract “soft skills.” It’s about the invisible leadership work tech leads are expected to do without ever being taught how. Attendees will leave with concrete ways to spot people problems early, make expectations explicit, and reduce the load they carry as tech leads.

If you’ve ever thought, “I didn’t expect the role to be this hard,” this talk is for you.

Key takeaways

  1. Why tech leads feel overloaded and how to reduce it at the source
  2. How unclear expectations create self-doubt, even in experienced tech leads
  3. How assumed alignment quietly creates friction and slows teams down – and what to do about it”
  • FEATURING
    Anemari Fiser
    Tech Lead Trainer

    Anemari Fiser is a tech leadership coach and trainer who helps engineers grow into confident, people-centered tech leads. She is the author of O’Reilly’s book Leveling Up as a Tech Lead and the creator of the O’Reilly course Soft Skills for Tech Leads.

    With over a decade of experience in the tech industry, she has held roles ranging from software engineer to engineering leader. As an independent coach and trainer, Anemari has coached 500+ engineers and trained 400+ tech leads across organisations worldwide. She also shares practical leadership insights with a community of 30,000+ tech professionals on LinkedIn.

    View Anemari’s profile

Talk

Director+•Experienced Manager•Tech Lead

The shadow culture: Why engineering principles fail under load

Why engineering principles collapse under pressure, and how redesigning systems makes the right behavior the easy default.

+ More

Talk

The shadow culture: Why engineering principles fail under load

16:10 – 16:35

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager Tech Lead

When pressure hits, culture breaks. This talk shows how system design drives behaviour and how leaders can redesign environments so principles survive real delivery pressure.

Every engineering organisation has principles: Quality first. Sustainable pace. Radical ownership. Yet when deadlines loom or incidents hit, teams often behave in direct opposition to them.

This is not a failure of belief or competence. It is a system design failure.

Under pressure, organisations do not behave according to what they say they value. They behave according to what the system makes cheap, risky, or impossible. When shortcuts cost less than robustness, engineers are not breaking the culture. They are rationally navigating the environment they have been given.

Drawing from real incident reviews and delivery trade-offs, this talk explores Shadow Culture, the behaviour that emerges when principles collide with reality.For instance, in one incident review, we realised our Quality First principle collapsed not because teams did not care, but because our CI pipeline added over 30 minutes to every change. Fixing the system changed behaviour faster than any retro ever had.

Rather than treating culture as something to communicate or reinforce, this session reframes it as a product that must function under load.

I will introduce a practical framework for pressure-testing engineering principles using four product lenses:

  • Viability: Does this behaviour support the business under real delivery constraints?
  • Value: Does it genuinely reduce risk or improve outcomes?
  • Usability: Is the right behaviour easier than the shortcut?
  • Feasibility: Can teams realistically do this during incidents and deadlines?

Leaders will learn how to spot where principles collapse under stress and how to redesign the environment so the right decision becomes the default rather than a heroic exception.

Key takeaways

  • The Shadow Culture Audit: Learn to read system signals (PR shortcuts, skipped tests) to see what your culture actually is.
  • The Stress-Test Framework: How to apply product design constraints to your principles to ensure they hold under pressure.
  • Environment Redesign: Concrete shifts in leadership levers from CI/CD friction to incentive structures—that make the right decision the default, not a heroic exception.

  • FEATURING
    Manogna Machiraju
    Head of EngineeringDomestic and General

    Manogna is a senior engineering leader with over a decade of experience building and scaling product engineering teams in high-pressure, regulated environments. She has led organisations through rapid growth, platform modernisation, and major reliability improvements, while balancing delivery speed with quality, security, and sustainability.

    View Manogna’s profile

Talk

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Tech Lead

The human consequences of software supply chain attacks

Why software supply chain decisions are leadership choices that can escalate into real-world harm, not just technical risk.

+ More

Talk

The human consequences of software supply chain attacks

11:05 – 11:30

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Tech Lead

Software supply chain failures are no longer just technical or financial risks. This talk shows how everyday engineering leadership decisions can escalate into real-world harm, and why modern leaders must treat software as safety-critical infrastructure.

Software supply chain attacks are usually discussed in terms of CVEs, compliance, and financial risk. This talk deliberately shifts that lens. As software increasingly underpins healthcare, transport, energy, and public services, engineering leadership decisions now carry consequences that extend well beyond systems and balance sheets.

Drawing on real incidents: from healthcare outages and emergency-service disruptions to infrastructure and embedded-system attacks, this session explores how ordinary, well-intentioned engineering trade-offs can cascade into human harm. These failures rarely start with negligence or malice. They emerge from abstraction: dependency choices, build pipelines treated as “internal”, unsupported components accepted as normal, and risk framed as something to insure rather than prevent.

A key theme is that software supply chain attacks are not just another category of cyber incident. They are a force multiplier, enabling ransomware, data theft, sabotage, and cyber-warfare at scale. With modern applications composed mainly of third-party code (much of it unmaintained) engineering leaders are increasingly responsible for systems they do not directly control but whose failures they must still answer for.

This is not a tool-centric security talk. It is a leadership talk about responsibility, prioritisation, and the hidden blast radius of everyday decisions. Attendees will leave with a clearer mental model for evaluating vulnerabilities in context, recognising when technical debt becomes a societal risk, and understanding why engineering leadership is, in many cases, now safety-critical.

Key takeaways

  1. Every-day engineering trade-offs can directly shape real-world outcomes, not just technical ones.
  2. Supply chain weaknesses turn small decisions into large, downstream failures you still own.
  3. “Risk” is a comforting abstraction that hides who actually gets hurt when systems fail.
  4. You can delegate code and tools, but not responsibility for consequences.
  5. Many software teams are now operating safety-critical systems–whether they realise it or not.
  • FEATURING
    Steve Poole
    Developer AdvocateHerodevs

    Steve Poole is an accomplished technical leader and developer advocate with over three decades of experience across software engineering, DevOps, security, and developer communities. He has held senior roles at IBM, Red Hat, and Sonatype, and is a Community Director at the London Java Community. A recognised international speaker and author, Steve focuses on software supply chain security, cybercrime, AI, and the leadership implications of emerging regulation. His work helps engineering leaders understand how everyday technical decisions shape long-term resilience, accountability, and real-world impact in modern software systems.

    View Steve’s profile

Lunch Break

Talk

Experienced Manager•New Manager•Tech Lead

Escaping the feature factory: Building strategic team identity

How to turn a ticket-driven engineering team into a strategic partner by shifting identity, metrics, and mindset toward outcomes.

+ More

Talk

Escaping the feature factory: Building strategic team identity

09:55 – 10:20

This session is suitable for:

Experienced Manager New Manager Tech Lead

A framework for transforming an engineering team from a ticket-churning “feature factory” into a trusted strategic partner using specific rituals, product-mindset shifts, and outcome-based metrics.

Many engineering teams fall into the trap of becoming a “Feature Factory.” We become highly efficient at shipping code but remain disconnected from the business value it creates. With the advent of AI and LLMs commoditizing code generation, this “order-taker” model is becoming obsolete. The future belongs to teams that provide strategic insight, not just faster syntax.

In this session, I will share my experience at one of UK’s major media organisations, where I led the transformation of a fragmented engineering team into a high-performing strategic partner for the Marketing department. We moved from a transactional relationship defined by urgent tickets to a collaborative partnership defined by shared business goals.

This talk is for any leader who wants to stop managing a service desk and start leading a strategic engineering function. You will leave with a playbook for building teams that don’t just write code, but build the business. This ensures your human talent remains indispensable in an AI-augmented world.

Key takeaways

  • Techniques to unify a fragmented team and establish strategic purpose and a culture of ownership.
  • Methods to shift engineering focus from output (velocity) to outcome (business value) to future-proof the team against AI commoditisation.
  • A framework for building trust with non-technical departments (like Marketing) to move from order-taker to advisor.
  • Metrics that successfully demonstrate engineering maturity and impact to business leadership.
  • FEATURING
    Priya Athipatla
    Engineering ManagerITV

    Priya Athipatla is an Engineering Leader with over 17 years of experience scaling enterprise platforms at ITV, ServiceNow, and Oracle. Currently leading teams in Streaming and MarTech engineering at ITV, she holds a dual mission: engineering the robust viewer platforms that underpin the ITVX legacy, and driving digital enablement strategies to unlock efficiency for ITV’s Marketing teams.

    Priya’s leadership philosophy is defined by a shift from “shipping code” to “delivering impact” – a perspective cemented while delivering critical enterprise workflow systems for healthcare, retail, and public sector clients during the global pandemic. She specialises in bridging technical architecture with user empathy, ensuring engineering teams never lose sight of the human at the end of the screen.

    Shaped by a personal journey of resilience through career breaks and international relocation, she is a vocal advocate for normalising non-linear career paths for women in tech. Priya speaks 5 languages and is learning her 6th. An avid reader, she can usually be found in her natural habitat on a park bench, nose buried in a book, oblivious to the world around her.

    View Priya’s profile

Talk

Director+•Experienced Manager•Tech Lead

Beyond timelines: Learning from incidents

How to run post-incident reviews that surface human, cultural, and psychological factors, turning incidents into deeper learning and resilience.

+ More

Talk

Beyond timelines: Learning from incidents

15:10 – 15:35

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager Tech Lead

Post-incident reviews often focus on timelines and technology, limiting learning. This talk shows how applying the Social Psychology of Risk helps leaders surface hidden psychological and cultural factors, improving understanding, trust, and organisational resilience.

Post-incident reviews often converge on familiar outputs: a timeline, contributing technical factors, insights into system behaviour, and a set of follow-up actions – frequently centred on monitoring, alerts, or process changes. While valuable, these outcomes rarely deliver the deeper learning needed to improve long-term individual and organisational resilience. They focus on what happened in the system, rather than how people experienced the incident while operating in its inception, moment of impact and recovery.

To learn more effectively from incidents, engineering leaders must extend their practice beyond the physical language of systems, events, and actions, and intentionally explore the psychological and cultural dimensions that shape technical and non-technical decision-making and attitudes to risk. This talk demonstrates how the Social Psychology of Risk (SPoR) can be applied to post-incident reviews to achieve deeper, kinder, and more meaningful learning.

Using the lenses of Workspace, Headspace, and Groupspace, the session shows how leaders can build stronger connections with review participants and surface often-hidden contributing factors. Most incident discussions remain in Workspace: tools, constraints, signals, and procedures. By also exploring Headspace (what people noticed, believed, felt, and prioritised) and Groupspace (relationships, hierarchy, norms, and power dynamics), leaders gain insight into how risk was perceived, decisions were made, and why actions made sense at the time.

Through real incident examples, attendees will see how subtle influences – such as confidence, doubt, incident history, and organisational pressure – shape decisions long before any “root cause” appears on a timeline. The talk demonstrates practical techniques for asking better questions, listening more effectively, and creating the psychological safety required for people to articulate these factors without fear or blame.

The talk will include experiential learning via a simple group exercise and reflective discussion. Attendees will leave with concrete approaches for facilitating post-incident reviews that go beyond technical analysis, strengthen leadership effectiveness, improve decision-making, and build teams and systems that are more resilient because they are better understood.

Key takeaways

  • What the Social Psychology of Risk is and why it matters in post-incident reviews.
  • How to use Workspace, Headspace, and Groupspace to analyse incidents more deeply.
  • Practical questioning and listening techniques that surface psychological and cultural influences without blame.
  • How these insights improve leadership effectiveness, decision-making, and organisational resilience.
  • FEATURING
    Lyndsay Prewer
    Principal ConsultantEqual Experts Ltd

    Lyndsay is a qualified rocket scientist and an engineer at heart, with over 30 years experience of helping individuals, teams and organisations improve their software delivery.

    For the past 11 years he’s been a consultant with Equal Experts, leading a range of engineering teams in the delivery of large-scale IT services. Problem domains have ranged from public sector organisations (UK’s tax and passport offices) to global, online retailers. He loves helping bridge the gaps between user and business needs, engineering disciplines and service operation.

    View Lyndsay’s profile

Afternoon Break

Talk

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

Building for impact

Design systems with real world users in mind, balancing tradeoffs, reducing risk, and maximizing impact through thoughtful iteration and practical threat modeling.

+ More

Talk

Building for impact

09:10 – 09:35

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

The systems we build always come with considerations and trade-offs. But are we considering the right ones? Let’s step through a system design process from start to finish with real world users in mind, iterating along the way to maximize effectiveness and minimize blast radius. There will be twist, turns, and threat models. What happens next is up to us.

Attendees will come away with different understandings of how to think about the systems they build, and practical knowledge of how to build their systems better to reflect those understandings.

  • FEATURING
    Ian Coldwater
    Kubernetes SIG Security ChairCNCF
    View Ian’s profile

Talk

Experienced Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

Detecting the dip: Turning noisy metrics into reliable production signals

How to move from noisy alerts to trusted signals by detecting the dips that actually matter to customers.

+ More

Talk

Detecting the dip: Turning noisy metrics into reliable production signals

11:40 – 12:05

This session is suitable for:

Experienced Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Detecting anomalies sounds simple–until real client traffic enters the picture. I’ll share how we learned to spot volume and conversion dips that matter, tune out the noise, and turn detection into trust.

When we first started looking for anomalies in our payment metrics data, the goal was simple: catch issues before clients did. The reality, of course, wasn’t that simple.

Our first version looked only for “volume zero” – complete outages. It worked for big events, but we quickly realised most of the pain lived in the subtle dips: the 10% drop at lunchtime, the steady weekend decline, the provider that failed only for one type of payments or even device. None of that showed up in the old alerts.

So we built something smarter. We started calculating a predicted line for each client, based on the data we hold – recognising that every one of them has their own traffic rhythm. Then we added anomaly lines above and below it to capture what “too high” or “too low” really means in their context. It wasn’t perfect, but with every iteration, the framework got better at noticing the right things, not just everything.

This talk is about how we evolved the way we use our data: how we went from total outages to anticipating small dips, from arguing over false alarms to trusting our signals. I’ll share what worked, what didn’t, and how this journey taught us about technical patterns.

Key takeaways

  • Start simple, then evolve with what your data actually teaches you.
  • Predicting traffic wasn’t the hardest part; agreeing on what’s normal was and how to alert on proper anomaly.
  • We learned to separate signal from noise by measuring burn rate and treating false positives as feedback, not failure.
  • Collaboration between engineering and CSMs was key – alerts only work if the people closest to clients can understand and act on them.
  • Building detection wasn’t just about models; it was about creating shared trust in what “an anomaly” really means.
  • FEATURING
    Karina Celis Jones
    Senior Engineer ManagerTrueLayer

    Karina is a Venezuelan-born software engineering leader with over 15 years of experience turning complex systems into reliable, human-centred solutions. She has led engineering teams in travel, publishing, advertising, and now fintech at TrueLayer, where she focuses on performance, reliability, and people-first leadership. With a background in software development and a passion for team culture, she helps engineers grow through clarity, empathy, and practical problem-solving. Karina is a strong advocate for inclusive workplaces and believes the best teams are those that feel supported and challenged to do meaningful work.

    View Karina’s profile

Talk

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

End of day wrap-up

Host’s closing remarks.

+ More

Talk

End of day wrap-up

17:10 – 17:20

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Host’s closing remarks.

  • FEATURING
    Sarah Wells
    Independent Technical Consultant & Author

    Sarah is a technology leader, consultant and conference speaker with a focus on engineering effectiveness, microservices, incident management, platform engineering, optimising for flow and technical strategy. She has over 20 years’ experience as a developer, principal engineer and tech director across product, platform, SRE and DevOps teams.

    She spent over a decade working at the Financial Times, as it transformed from 12 releases a year to more than 20,000, embracing autonomous empowered teams and adopting microservices, DevOps, containers and platform engineering.

    She is the author of the O’Reilly book Enabling Microservice Success: Managing Technical, Organizational and Cultural Challenges.

    View Sarah’s profile
DirectorPlus zone

DirectorPlus Roundtable

Director+

AI and the software development lifecycle: what will change and what will stay the same?

Exploring how AI tools and evolving skill requirements are reshaping engineering careers, hiring practices, and growth paths for the next generation.

+ More

DirectorPlus Roundtable

AI and the software development lifecycle: what will change and what will stay the same?

10:00 – 10:55

This session is suitable for:

Director+

A roundtable on how AI is reshaping and reinventing the software development process, and what it means for individual developers, teams, and leadership.

Discussion includes:

  • What are the steps between traditional and AI-native approaches to software development, and when should we take those steps?
  • How does the developer role change, and how will developers learn and improve as they write less code?
  • How can we prepare our teams and organisations now?

  • FEATURING
    Hywel Carver
    CTO-turned-FounderSkiller Whale

    Hywel wrote his first program in C aged 9. After graduating with an MEng from Cambridge, he dropped out of his PhD programme to co-found his first start-up. Today, Hywel is Skiller Whale’s Co-Founder and CEO. He runs a dinner club for CTOs, a podcast for tech leaders called ‘Primarily Context-Based’, and is designing and building his own 8-bit computer for playing Pong. In his 12+ year career, he’s been building and scaling start-ups. With Skiller Whale, he is drawing on that experience to solve the biggest problem he faced as a CTO: learning for engineering teams.

    View Hywel’s profile

DirectorPlus Roundtable

Director+

Growing senior engineers: Supporting technical progression beyond management

Explore how to grow senior and staff engineers through clear career paths, strong technical leadership opportunities, and environments that support meaningful impact.

+ More

DirectorPlus Roundtable

Growing senior engineers: Supporting technical progression beyond management

10:00 – 10:55

This session is suitable for:

Director+

A roundtable on how organisations develop strong technical leaders without pushing engineers into management roles.

Discussion includes:

  • Designing career paths for senior and staff engineers
  • Supporting technical leadership across teams
  • Creating environments where senior engineers can grow and have impact

DirectorPlus Roundtable

Director+

Measuring engineering impact: Metrics that actually drive improvement

Define meaningful engineering metrics that improve productivity, quality, and delivery while clearly communicating performance and outcomes to executives and boards.

+ More

DirectorPlus Roundtable

Measuring engineering impact: Metrics that actually drive improvement

10:00 – 10:55

This session is suitable for:

Director+

A roundtable on defining meaningful metrics for productivity, quality and delivery.

Discussion includes:

  • Identifying metrics that reflect real engineering outcomes
  • Measuring the impact of AI tools and automation on productivity
  • Reporting effectively on engineering performance to executives and boards

DirectorPlus Roundtable

Director+

Adopting AI in real systems: Moving from experimentation to organisational capability

Moving AI from experiments to real organisational capability by integrating tools into existing systems, workflows, and everyday engineering practices.

+ More

DirectorPlus Roundtable

Adopting AI in real systems: Moving from experimentation to organisational capability

11:30 – 12:25

This session is suitable for:

Director+

A roundtable on introducing AI tools and workflows into existing engineering systems and teams.

Discussion includes:

  • Identifying high-leverage AI use cases across the development lifecycle
  • Integrating AI into existing (“brownfield”) systems and workflows
  • Setting realistic expectations for productivity gains and organisational change

DirectorPlus Roundtable

Director+

Delivering more with fewer resources: How to maintain impact under tighter constraints

Practical strategies for engineering leaders to prioritize ruthlessly, remove low-value work, and sustain team performance despite growing expectations and tighter resources.

+ More

DirectorPlus Roundtable

Delivering more with fewer resources: How to maintain impact under tighter constraints

11:30 – 12:25

This session is suitable for:

Director+

A roundtable on how engineering leaders maintain delivery, quality, and team health when resources are limited and expectations continue to grow.

Discussion includes:

  • How to prioritise work when teams cannot do everything the business asks for
  • How to identify and eliminate work that doesn’t create meaningful impact
  • How to balance delivery pressure with maintaining sustainable team health
  • How to help teams focus on the highest-value work when resources are constrained
  • FEATURING
    James Da Costa
    VP of Engineering at Cint

    James Da Costa is VP of Engineering at Cint where he leads teams building services which connect researchers with respondents at scale. He is passionate about coaching managers, building collaborative teams and creating delightful products.

    James has over 20 years of experience in tech and has worked in UI design, frontend and backend technologies.

    Outside of work, he loves competitive sports, a good mystery novel and listening to his favourite podcast (You Are Not So Smart).

    View James ‘s profile

DirectorPlus Roundtable

Director+

From strategy to execution: Aligning teams around priorities

Turn strategic goals into clear priorities by aligning teams, defining success metrics, and adapting plans while staying focused on outcomes.

+ More

DirectorPlus Roundtable

From strategy to execution: Aligning teams around priorities

11:30 – 12:25

This session is suitable for:

Director+

A roundtable on translating strategic goals into clear priorities and delivery outcomes.

Discussion includes:

  • Creating alignment across multiple teams and stakeholders
  • Setting clear success metrics and accountability
  • Adjusting plans without losing focus on strategic outcomes
  • FEATURING
    Dan Blundell
    Engineering DirectorGymshark

    Dan is an engineering leader and builder of technical teams. He aims to create environments where each person feels valued, supported and can learn continuously, together. At Gymshark, Dan heads up Core Engineering and is responsible for data pipelines, API and integration development and platform reliability engineering.

    Dan will forever be a student of leadership, values feedback above almost anything else and would love to hear how best to help you. His latest side project is taming the tantrums of two toddlers and aims to coach them in the ways of empathy, responsibility and being a good human. Dan will eventually write a book but for now, tweets irregularly at @danblundell and posts sporadically at danblundell.com

    View Dan’s profile

DirectorPlus Roundtable

Director+

Reducing cognitive load for engineers: How to simplify systems and tooling at scale

Reducing engineering complexity by simplifying tooling, systems, and ownership models so teams can focus on delivering real product value.

+ More

DirectorPlus Roundtable

Reducing cognitive load for engineers: How to simplify systems and tooling at scale

11:30 – 12:25

This session is suitable for:

Director+

Sponsored by

Docker LeadDev

A roundtable on how engineering leaders reduce unnecessary complexity so teams can focus on delivering value.

Discussion includes:

  • How to identify the biggest sources of cognitive load in engineering organisations
  • How to simplify tooling, infrastructure, and development workflows
  • How to design team ownership and systems that reduce operational complexity
  • How to maintain productivity and focus as systems and organisations scale

DirectorPlus Workshop

Director+

Beyond the hype: Adopting and measuring AI tools safely in regulated, high-velocity engineering teams

Adopt AI safely in regulated engineering teams using platform guardrails, secure defaults, and metrics that prove real productivity gains.

+ More

DirectorPlus Workshop

Beyond the hype: Adopting and measuring AI tools safely in regulated, high-velocity engineering teams

11:35 – 12:55

This session is suitable for:

Director+

This workshop provides senior engineering leaders with practical frameworks to govern AI adoption. We are all feeling the pressure to adopt AI, but deploying it recklessly in complex, legacy, or regulated environments carries enormous risk. This session explores how you can treat your internal platform as a product, designing “secure defaults” that allow teams to experiment safely while proving the actual ROI of AI tooling.

You’ll leave this session with an understanding and application of:

  • System design for AI tools. Practical techniques for designing “secure defaults” and extensible platform guardrails that automatically catch AI-generated technical debt.
  • Meaningful measurement: How to define and implement an “impact vs. guardrail” metrics framework to measure the true ROI of AI (moving beyond lines of code to actual developer experience and system friction).
  • Bottleneck navigation: Strategies to identify and unblock the new human and systemic bottlenecks in your delivery pipeline now that writing code itself is getting faster.
  • FEATURING
    Luke Briscoe
    Engineering Director – Platform & DataMonzo Bank

    Luke Briscoe is the Engineering Director for Platform at Monzo Bank. He leads the teams who build and operate the platform that serves Monzo’s 12 million customers today, the data platform behind the bank, and the overall developer experience. Luke’s expertise lies in building distributed systems that are resilient to failure, incident management (for when things inevitably go wrong), and scaling engineering teams and organisations.

    View Luke’s profile

DirectorPlus Roundtable

Director+

Performance, calibration and compensation: Creating fair and effective systems

Design fair performance and compensation systems that motivate teams, align goals with business outcomes, and retain high performing engineers.

+ More

DirectorPlus Roundtable

Performance, calibration and compensation: Creating fair and effective systems

13:00 – 13:55

This session is suitable for:

Director+

A roundtable on designing performance systems that motivate teams, support growth and retain top performers.

Discussion includes:

  • Defining clear performance expectations and metrics across teams and roles
  • Aligning individual goals with organisational priorities and business outcomes
  • Running effective calibration processes that balance fairness, transparency and leadership judgement
  • Using performance and compensation frameworks to retain and grow high-performing engineers
  • FEATURING
    JooBee Yeow
    Adviser to FoundersLearngility

    JooBee Yeow is a business strategist, systems thinker and start-up scaling architect. A trained Systems Engineer with a PhD in Leadership Development, she operates at the intersection of people, strategy and business as a Chief People Officer.

    With experience spanning 2-, 20-, and 200-year-old companies and revenues from £10M to £1B, she helps founders transition from ‘STARTing to Build’ to ‘BUILDing to Scale’—designing scalable operating systems that fuel start-up growth.

    JooBee is the creator of the Scaling Start-Ups Blog & Newsletter and a trusted voice in the start-up ecosystem, contributing insights to Sifted, Notion Capital, Atomico, Balderton, Forestay and beyond.

    View JooBee’s profile

DirectorPlus Roundtable

Director+

Managing managers when everything is changing

Supporting and developing managers through organizational change, balancing autonomy, feedback, and stability as expectations and structures continue to evolve.

+ More

DirectorPlus Roundtable

Managing managers when everything is changing

13:00 – 13:55

This session is suitable for:

Director+

A roundtable on navigating the challenges of managing managers as organisations evolve. As structures flatten and expectations grow, leaders must rethink how they support, develop, and guide their management layer.

Discussion includes:

  • Giving a manager the feedback and support they need when they’re struggling but not failing — and when to call it
  • Managing your managers through upheaval — when they need to stay steady for their teams while you’re figuring it out yourself
  • Building managers who can operate with more autonomy as organizations flatten
  • FEATURING
    Suzan Bond
    Founder & CEOConstellary

    Suzan Bond is the founder and CEO of Constellary. With nearly two decades in tech, Suzan has worked with hundreds of engineering leaders and leadership teams to help them navigate change and meet the challenges of organizational leadership. Her work these days includes preparing new directors for the role, coaching senior engineering leaders and creating cohesive leadership teams.

    View Suzan’s profile

DirectorPlus Roundtable

Director+

Designing organizations that scale: Teams, ownership and boundaries

Discuss how to design scalable engineering organizations by defining team ownership, architectural boundaries, and structures that support autonomy and alignment.

+ More

DirectorPlus Roundtable

Designing organizations that scale: Teams, ownership and boundaries

13:00 – 13:55

This session is suitable for:

Director+

A roundtable on structuring engineering organisations to support autonomy, alignment and growth.

Discussion includes:

  • Defining team ownership and architectural boundaries
  • Avoiding coordination overload as organisations grow
  • Evolving team structures as systems and products scale
  • FEATURING
    Oge Opara-Nadi
    VP of EngineeringHey Savi

    Oge is VP of Engineering at Hey Savi, a fashion tech startup revolutionising how women search and shop online through AI-driven innovation. She leads the engineering team, driving rapid product development while championing equity, diversity and inclusion in the tech industry.

    An experienced public speaker, Oge regularly shares insights on leadership, engineering excellence, building diverse teams and fostering inclusive cultures that empower innovation and growth.

    View profile

DirectorPlus Roundtable

Director+

Designing organizations that scale: Teams, ownership and boundaries

Discuss how to design scalable engineering organizations by defining team ownership, architectural boundaries, and structures that support autonomy and alignment.

+ More

DirectorPlus Roundtable

Designing organizations that scale: Teams, ownership and boundaries

14:30 – 15:25

This session is suitable for:

Director+

A roundtable on structuring engineering organisations to support autonomy, alignment and growth.

Discussion includes:

  • Defining team ownership and architectural boundaries
  • Avoiding coordination overload as organisations grow
  • Evolving team structures as systems and products scale
  • FEATURING
    Oge Opara-Nadi
    VP of EngineeringHey Savi

    Oge is VP of Engineering at Hey Savi, a fashion tech startup revolutionising how women search and shop online through AI-driven innovation. She leads the engineering team, driving rapid product development while championing equity, diversity and inclusion in the tech industry.

    An experienced public speaker, Oge regularly shares insights on leadership, engineering excellence, building diverse teams and fostering inclusive cultures that empower innovation and growth.

    View profile

DirectorPlus Roundtable

Director+

AI and the software development lifecycle: what will change and what will stay the same?

Exploring how AI tools and evolving skill requirements are reshaping engineering careers, hiring practices, and growth paths for the next generation.

+ More

DirectorPlus Roundtable

AI and the software development lifecycle: what will change and what will stay the same?

14:30 – 15:25

This session is suitable for:

Director+

A roundtable on how AI is reshaping and reinventing the software development process, and what it means for individual developers, teams, and leadership.

Discussion includes:

  • What are the steps between traditional and AI-native approaches to software development, and when should we take those steps?
  • How does the developer role change, and how will developers learn and improve as they write less code?
  • How can we prepare our teams and organisations now?

  • FEATURING
    Hywel Carver
    CTO-turned-FounderSkiller Whale

    Hywel wrote his first program in C aged 9. After graduating with an MEng from Cambridge, he dropped out of his PhD programme to co-found his first start-up. Today, Hywel is Skiller Whale’s Co-Founder and CEO. He runs a dinner club for CTOs, a podcast for tech leaders called ‘Primarily Context-Based’, and is designing and building his own 8-bit computer for playing Pong. In his 12+ year career, he’s been building and scaling start-ups. With Skiller Whale, he is drawing on that experience to solve the biggest problem he faced as a CTO: learning for engineering teams.

    View Hywel’s profile

DirectorPlus Roundtable

Director+

Growing senior engineers: Supporting technical progression beyond management

Explore how to grow senior and staff engineers through clear career paths, strong technical leadership opportunities, and environments that support meaningful impact.

+ More

DirectorPlus Roundtable

Growing senior engineers: Supporting technical progression beyond management

14:30 – 15:25

This session is suitable for:

Director+

A roundtable on how organisations develop strong technical leaders without pushing engineers into management roles.

Discussion includes:

  • Designing career paths for senior and staff engineers
  • Supporting technical leadership across teams
  • Creating environments where senior engineers can grow and have impact

DirectorPlus Roundtable

Director+

Managing managers when everything is changing

Supporting and developing managers through organizational change, balancing autonomy, feedback, and stability as expectations and structures continue to evolve.

+ More

DirectorPlus Roundtable

Managing managers when everything is changing

14:30 – 15:25

This session is suitable for:

Director+

A roundtable on navigating the challenges of managing managers as organisations evolve. As structures flatten and expectations grow, leaders must rethink how they support, develop, and guide their management layer.

Discussion includes:

  • Giving a manager the feedback and support they need when they’re struggling but not failing — and when to call it
  • Managing your managers through upheaval — when they need to stay steady for their teams while you’re figuring it out yourself
  • Building managers who can operate with more autonomy as organizations flatten
  • FEATURING
    Suzan Bond
    Founder & CEOConstellary

    Suzan Bond is the founder and CEO of Constellary. With nearly two decades in tech, Suzan has worked with hundreds of engineering leaders and leadership teams to help them navigate change and meet the challenges of organizational leadership. Her work these days includes preparing new directors for the role, coaching senior engineering leaders and creating cohesive leadership teams.

    View Suzan’s profile

DirectorPlus Roundtable

Director+

Adopting AI in real systems: Moving from experimentation to organisational capability

Moving AI from experiments to real organisational capability by integrating tools into existing systems, workflows, and everyday engineering practices.

+ More

DirectorPlus Roundtable

Adopting AI in real systems: Moving from experimentation to organisational capability

14:30 – 15:25

This session is suitable for:

Director+

A roundtable on introducing AI tools and workflows into existing engineering systems and teams.

Discussion includes:

  • Identifying high-leverage AI use cases across the development lifecycle
  • Integrating AI into existing (“brownfield”) systems and workflows
  • Setting realistic expectations for productivity gains and organisational change
Community Zone

Table Talk

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

How do you build a learning culture that keeps pace with rapidly evolving technology and AI trends?

Join facilitated conversations and dive into key issues facing engineering teams

+ More

Table Talk

How do you build a learning culture that keeps pace with rapidly evolving technology and AI trends?

09:55 – 10:20

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Sponsored by

O'Reilly x LeadDev

Join facilitated conversations and dive into key issues facing engineering teams

There’s never a single silver bullet for any problem and often you’ll need to combine the ideas of multiple people to find the perfect solution for your team. We’ll be discussing some core issues in the Table Talk sessions, hosted by a group of engineering leaders who are on hand to provide their perspectives and help guide the conversation. You can dip in and out of discussions depending on what interests you the most.

  • FEATURING
    Simone van Buuren
    Staff EngineerPleo

    Simone van Buuren is a Staff Engineer at Pleo.

    View Simone’s profile
  • Alexia Pedersen
    SVP InternationalO'Reilly

    Lex Pedersen leads the international team at O’Reilly and is responsible for creating and delivering value to the company’s customers. In this role, she provides support and vision to ensure the sales and customer success teams support customers throughout their learning journeys with O’Reilly.

    Lex has a passion for learning across the enterprise. She’s spent over 20 years in the technology sector, including time at Microsoft and Xerox, and brings extensive knowledge of working with large organizations to implement learning at scale to deliver successful outcomes.

    View Alexia’s profile
  • Meng Muk
    SVP of Software EngineeringDexory

    Meng is SVP of Software Engineering at Dexory, operating at the intersection of robotics, data and AI. With over 20 years of experience, she has built and scaled engineering organisations in robotics and automation, where hardware and software must ship together, and in cloud data platforms. Meng builds the teams, architectures and practices needed to move from early product to global deployment. A champion of learning cultures and early-career talent, she believes that when technology is shifting this fast, the people who thrive are the ones most willing to unlearn and relearn.

    View Meng’s profile

Community Representation Groups

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

Connecting trans* and gender non-conforming leaders

Connect with other leaders who have similar backgrounds and experiences to yours, and build a peer network for support throughout your leadership journey.

+ More

Community Representation Groups

Connecting trans* and gender non-conforming leaders

10:25 – 10:50

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Connect with folks over shared experiences

Everyone’s journey into leadership is tough, but folks who are underrepresented in tech often face their own unique set of challenges. And that can lead to people feeling isolated in their experiences. 

Come to the community representation groups, where you’ll be able to connect with folks who might have similar backgrounds and experiences to yours, and where you’ll be able to build a peer network for support throughout your journey.

  • FEATURING
    Dee Kitchen
    VP, EngineeringGrafana Labs

    An engineer since 1996 and a people and project leader since 2005, Dee is a deeply technical senior leader who stays hands-on with technical direction while maintaining a strong commitment to developing engineers and engineering managers. Dee focuses on ensuring teams have both the right technology and the right support to successfully deliver on their mission.

    Over the past decade, Dee’s technical work has centered on observability, distributed databases, and privacy at Grafana Labs, as well as security products at Cloudflare, including firewalls, denial-of-service protection, traffic matching, and end-user protection. Alongside this work, Dee has led with a strong emphasis on mental health and wellbeing, diversity, and the personal growth of direct reports.

    View Dee’s profile
  • Madeline Fletcher
    Development ManagerShopify

    Madeline works as a Development Manager in the Retail team at Shopify, supporting engineers to do their best work and push themselves in order to achieve their goals. She has previously worked in diverse industry sectors such as a charity, consultancy and media. She is proud to be a visible LGBTQIA+ leader.

    View Madeline’s profile
  • Sam Collard
    Technical lead

    Sam is a frontend specialist, using their 25+ years of programming experience to build a safe environment for upskilling and best practices. They care deeply about accessibility, sustainability and ethics in computing, and have been known to dabble in music and visual coding on the side.

    View profile

Table Talk

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

How do you build a testing culture where everyone feels responsible for quality?

Join facilitated conversations and dive into key issues facing engineering teams

+ More

Table Talk

How do you build a testing culture where everyone feels responsible for quality?

10:55 – 11:20

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Sponsored by

Testkube LeadDev

Join facilitated conversations and dive into key issues facing engineering teams

There’s never a single silver bullet for any problem and often you’ll need to combine the ideas of multiple people to find the perfect solution for your team. We’ll be discussing some core issues in the Table Talk sessions, hosted by a group of engineering leaders who are on hand to provide their perspectives and help guide the conversation. You can dip in and out of discussions depending on what interests you the most.

  • FEATURING
    Jon Greenall
    Engineering LeadWise

    Jon Greenall is an Engineering Lead at Wise.

    View Jon’s profile
  • Ole Lensmar
    CTOTestkube

    Ole started building with XML APIs in the late 90s and has since then worked with multiple technologies and startups, most notably as creator of SoapUI in 2004 and Chairman of the Swagger / OpenAPI Initiative in 2015.

    He joined Testkube at its inception in 2021 and is now entirely focused on ensuring its success at bringing continuous testing to the cloud-native space.

    When not at his laptop he can be found playing a guitar or riding a bike, but rarely both at the same time.

    View Ole’s profile
  • Michela Federico
    Web Engineering LeadUnite Students

    Michela Federico is a Web Engineering Lead and transformation-focused engineering leader passionate about fast flow, developer experience, and organisational design. With over a decade in software and leadership, she helps teams optimise delivery through DevOps practices, platform thinking, and continuous improvement. She is the creator of the “Continuous Mindset,” a holistic approach that aligns technology, people, and processes with natural feedback loops to drive sustainable performance. Michela mentors engineers globally and speaks about building high-performing, learning-oriented teams.

    View Michela’s profile

Table Talk

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

How do you secure your software supply chain without slowing down delivery?

Join facilitated conversations and dive into key issues facing engineering teams

+ More

Table Talk

How do you secure your software supply chain without slowing down delivery?

11:40 – 12:05

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Sponsored by

Chainguard LeadDev

Join facilitated conversations and dive into key issues facing engineering teams

There’s never a single silver bullet for any problem and often you’ll need to combine the ideas of multiple people to find the perfect solution for your team. We’ll be discussing some core issues in the Table Talk sessions, hosted by a group of engineering leaders who are on hand to provide their perspectives and help guide the conversation. You can dip in and out of discussions depending on what interests you the most.

  • FEATURING
    Shana Dacres-Lawrence
    Senior Principal ArchitectAccenture

    Shana Dacres-Lawrence is a Senior Principal Architect at Accenture.

    View Shana’s profile
  • Mark Allen
    Head of EngineeringJunction

    Mark Allen is a Head of Engineering at Junction.

    View Mark’s profile
  • Tom Finch
    Sales Engineering Manager, EMEAChainguard

    Tom Finch is a technical leader at Chainguard specialising in software supply chain security, minimal container images, and secure-by-default cloud-native architectures. He works hands-on with platform and engineering teams to reduce CVE exposure, harden container environments, and modernise build pipelines using distroless and minimal base images.

    Previously at Wiz, Tom advised enterprises on cloud security posture management across complex multi-cloud environments. At Puppet, he helped organisations automate infrastructure and implement policy-driven configuration management at scale.

    With deep expertise in Kubernetes, containers, CI/CD pipelines, and infrastructure as code, Tom focuses on practical security outcomes — reducing attack surface, improving SBOM transparency, and shifting security left without slowing development velocity.

    View Tom’s profile

Industry Interest Groups

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

Connecting engineering leaders in media and entertainment

Connect with other leaders working in similar domains to share ideas, collaborate on challenges, and exchange solutions.

+ More

Industry Interest Groups

Connecting engineering leaders in media and entertainment

11:40 – 12:05

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Connect with folks over shared experiences

Building great software comes with unique challenges in every industry and often, the best insights come from others who are in the same boat. Join our relaxed sessions where you can meet peers working in similar domains to share ideas, collaborate on challenges and exchange solutions.

  • FEATURING
    Gokce Koyun
    Lead EngineerITV

    With over 20 years in technology, the majority spent at ITV, she has witnessed and contributed to the evolution of one of today’s major streaming platforms. She has worked across a range of technologies including .NET, Scala, and currently Go, with a strong focus on highly available, high-traffic systems. Passionate about reliability, observability, and continuous learning, she cares deeply about improving the engineering experience and building autonomous teams. Outside of work, she enjoys reading, travelling, and knitting.

    View Gokce’s profile
  • Nazlı Sahin
    Director of Security, Risk and ComplianceAccedo

    Nazli leads security strategy, risk management, and compliance for a global organization. Over a decade in leadership, she has shaped security policies, controls, and governance frameworks, from incident response and AI governance to ISO 27001 and GDPR compliance. She has built teams that operate independently while she focuses on strategic direction and organizational security posture. Nazli believes effective leadership means seeing potential in others and creating environments where, with the right balance of challenge, support, and trust, people grow and elevate those around them.

    View Nazlı’s profile
  • Tatiana Stantonian
    Principal EngineerFinancial Times

    Tatiana Stantonian is a Principal Engineer and engineering manager at the Financial Times, based in London. She works across teams to shape the systems and direction for FT.com’s Customer Lifecycle area, including subscription growth and retention. With a background at the Government Digital Service and over a decade in software engineering, she’s passionate about the intersection of user experience, business impact, and technical systems. She recently led the implementation of two major AI projects at the FT, and loves helping teams find the highest value work they can deliver.

    View Tatiana’s profile

Table Talk

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

How do you coach effectively under constant delivery pressure and rising expectations?

Join facilitated conversations and dive into key issues facing engineering teams

+ More

Table Talk

How do you coach effectively under constant delivery pressure and rising expectations?

12:25 – 12:50

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Sponsored by

Retool LeadDev

Join facilitated conversations and dive into key issues facing engineering teams

There’s never a single silver bullet for any problem and often you’ll need to combine the ideas of multiple people to find the perfect solution for your team. We’ll be discussing some core issues in the Table Talk sessions, hosted by a group of engineering leaders who are on hand to provide their perspectives and help guide the conversation. You can dip in and out of discussions depending on what interests you the most.

  • FEATURING
    Priyanka Bettadapura
    Senior Software EngineerMicrosoft

    Priyanka Bettadapura is a Senior Software Engineer at Microsoft working on Azure AI/ML infrastructure. With over 12 years of experience across Microsoft, Zoom, Oracle, Capillary Technologies, and Caterpillar, she has built scalable distributed systems, optimized Kubernetes clusters, and driven cloud cost savings exceeding $1M while maintaining 99.99% availability. Priyanka shares technical insights through her blog (priyankabswe.substack.com) and open-source contributions on GitHub (pribetta). She is passionate about AI/ML systems, technical leadership, and building reliable cloud infrastructure. Outside of work, she enjoys hiking, traveling, and advocating for animal welfare.

    View Priyanka’s profile
  • Tom Butterwith
    Senior Director of EngineeringVEED

    Tom Butterwith is a Senior Director of Engineering at VEED, where he leads the growth engineering and AI research teams. With over a decade of experience in software engineering, he has built and scaled teams across scale-ups and large enterprises. Tom focuses on empowering engineers to do great work, and applying AI where it delivers real value over hype.

    View Tom’s profile

Community Representation Groups

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

Connecting queer leaders

Connect with other leaders who have similar backgrounds and experiences to yours, and build a peer network for support throughout your leadership journey.

+ More

Community Representation Groups

Connecting queer leaders

12:25 – 12:50

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Connect with folks over shared experiences

Everyone’s journey into leadership is tough, but folks who are underrepresented in tech often face their own unique set of challenges. And that can lead to people feeling isolated in their experiences. 

Come to the community representation groups, where you’ll be able to connect with folks who might have similar backgrounds and experiences to yours, and where you’ll be able to build a peer network for support throughout your journey.

  • FEATURING
    Linn Foster
    Director of Engineering ManagementExclaimer

    As Director of Engineering Management at Exclaimer, Linn leads Exclaimer’s Engineering department with a strong focus on people leadership, continuous improvement, and technical excellence. She is passionate about building highly engaged and collaborative teams by fostering a people-first culture.

     

    View Linn’s profile
  • Dougie Robertson
    Engineering ManagerITV

    Dougie is an Engineering Manager at ITVX, and Deputy Chair for ITV Pride. His route to engineering management was quite scenic, with a professional background in TV production and Japanese language. He is passionate about the responsibility of being a visible LGBTQIA+ leader in our industry.

    View Dougie’s profile
  • Alfie Potter
    Solutions Consultant Iterable

    Alfie is a Technical Analyst for the Enterprise Architecture team at ITV. As a Technical Analyst, he has numerous responsibilities. Such as project support on award winning broadcast initiatives, modelling ITVs technology landscape, supporting business architects in developing ITVs strategy and forming the frameworks for technology governance processes. Additionally he works on the IBC Accelerator Media Innovation Programme, fostering mainstream innovation in media.

    Outside of his day job, Alfie sits on the committees of ITV Pride, Out in Tech and Intermedia, where he is actively working on events for LGBTQ+ people in the broadcast and tech industry.

    View Alfie’s profile

Community Representation Groups

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

Connecting leaders from non-traditional backgrounds

Connect with other leaders with similar backgrounds and experiences to you, and build a peer network for support throughout your leadership journey.

+ More

Community Representation Groups

Connecting leaders from non-traditional backgrounds

13:10 – 13:35

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Connect with folks over shared experiences

Everyone’s journey into leadership is tough, but folks who are underrepresented in tech often face their own unique set of challenges. And that can lead to people feeling isolated in their experiences. 

Come to the community representation groups, where you’ll be able to connect with folks who might have similar backgrounds and experiences to you, and where you’ll be able to build a peer network for support throughout your journey.

  • FEATURING
    Jessie Auguste
    Software EngineerCybSafe

    As an award-winning Software Engineer at CybSafe, Jessie drives secure software development practices while scaling engineering teams in the UK’s fast-paced startup ecosystem. Her technical expertise spans cybersecurity, application security, and building resilient systems that protect organisations from evolving threats.

    Beyond her engineering contributions, Jessie is a recognized leader in fostering inclusive tech cultures. She founded and hosts Glowing in Tech, a platform that has become a vital resource for tech leaders seeking to build more diverse and innovative teams. Through this work, she’s helped hundreds of underrepresented professionals advance their careers while providing actionable insights for leadership teams on creating inclusive environments that drive business results.

    As a sought-after technical speaker, Jessie has delivered keynotes and workshops at leading industry events including LeadDev, DevConf, React Miami, and BeJS, as well as for organizations like Docker and codebar. Her presentations focus on practical leadership strategies, secure coding practices, and building high-performing diverse teams.

    Jessie’s leadership extends to curriculum development, where she’s created and delivered specialised technical training programs, including OWASP secure coding principles courses. Her educational initiatives have equipped both individual contributors and engineering leaders with the skills needed to build secure, scalable systems while advancing DEI objectives.

    Through her board position with Girl Dreamer and active involvement with Coding Black Females, Jessie provides strategic guidance to organisations looking to transform their hiring, retention, and promotion practices in tech.

    View Jessie’s profile
  • Eleanor Deal
    Senior Engineer IICrowdStrike

    Eleanor is a Senior Engineer II at CrowdStrike working in Cloud Security, with 10 years software engineering and leadership experience. She is a Women Techmakers Ambassador and has a strong background in building engineering teams and communities. Eleanor is an outspoken advocate for diversity and inclusivity, taking a data-led approach to tackling challenges keeping people from thriving in technology.

    View Eleanor’s profile
  • Rahul Verma
    Engineering LeaderMeta

    Rahul is an Engineering Leader, currently supporting the Privacy team at Meta (Facebook), in London.

    He is driven by the passion to build, grow and retain high performing teams. Rahul also has rich experience in building highly scalable technology solutions in different domains like user data privacy, collaboration platforms (Slack) and travel commerce (Expedia). Rahul loves to drive clarity in vision and goals for the team.

    View Rahul’s profile

Community Representation Groups

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

Connecting Asian leaders

Connect with other leaders who have similar backgrounds and experiences to yours, and build a peer network for support throughout your leadership journey.

+ More

Community Representation Groups

Connecting Asian leaders

13:55 – 14:20

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Connect with folks over shared experiences

Everyone’s journey into leadership is tough, but folks who are underrepresented in tech often face their own unique set of challenges. And that can lead to people feeling isolated in their experiences. 

Come to the community representation groups, where you’ll be able to connect with folks who might have similar backgrounds and experiences to yours, and where you’ll be able to build a peer network for support throughout your journey.

  • FEATURING
    Bharathy Seralathan
    Engineering ManagerExclaimer Ltd

    Bharathy Seralathan is an Engineering Manager at Exclaimer, where she leads core functional teams in delivering scalable, cloud-based solutions. With over 15 years of experience in software engineering, she brings deep understanding in software development, agile methodologies, and team leadership.


    Bharathy is passionate about building high-performing teams and creating environments where people can thrive. Known for her curiosity, authenticity, creativity, and altruism, she is committed to fostering growth in others and enjoys mentoring the next generation of engineers.


    Outside of work, Bharathy volunteers at community cultural events and supports a women’s charity group that offers free dance sessions.

    View Bharathy’s profile
  • Karen Lee Rigg
    Director of Engineering, Global Intelligence PlatformsJust Eat Takeaway.com

    Karen is a Director of Engineering at Just Eat Takeaway.com, a leading global online food delivery marketplace, connecting consumers and partners to empower everyday convenience. Previously, Karen was a Director of Engineering at Permutive, a best in class audience platform for advertisers and publishers, and a Tech Lead at Thoughtworks, a leading global technology consultancy.

    Outside of work, she can be found rock climbing in the Peak District, snowboarding in the Alps and occasionally sailing in the Caribbean.

     

    View Karen’s profile
  • Andrew Huang
    Technical LeadSoftwire

    A mentor and coach to engineers of all levels, Andrew is a Technical Lead at Softwire. They are impactful in accelerating the careers and personal development of all the people they lead, supporting ambitious colleagues with career guidance, role mentorship and job satisfaction.

    View Andrew ‘s profile

Table Talk

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

How do you build AI into day-to-day workflows in a way that consistently improves developer productivity?

Join facilitated conversations and dive into key issues facing engineering teams.

+ More

Table Talk

How do you build AI into day-to-day workflows in a way that consistently improves developer productivity?

14:25 – 14:50

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Sponsored by

Temporal LeadDev

Join facilitated conversations and dive into key issues facing engineering teams

There’s never a single silver bullet for any problem and often you’ll need to combine the ideas of multiple people to find the perfect solution for your team. We’ll be discussing some core issues in the Table Talk sessions, hosted by a group of engineering leaders who are on hand to provide their perspectives and help guide the conversation. You can dip in and out of discussions depending on what interests you the most.

  • FEATURING
    Eshwari Chandrashekhar
    Engineering ManagerMONY Group plc

    Eshwari Chandrashekhar is an Engineering Manager at MONY Group plc.

    View Eshwari’s profile
  • Josh Bryant
    Director of EngineeringZappi

    Josh is Director of Engineering at Zappi, a B2B SaaS market research platform, where he leads teams across SRE, Developer Experience, Data Platform, and Data Science. He’s interested in the interplay between people and technology — how engineering organisations are structured, how senior leaders develop, and how teams adapt as the tools they work with fundamentally change.

    View Josh’s profile

Industry Interest Groups

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

Connecting engineering leaders in healthcare

Connect with other leaders working in similar domains to share ideas, collaborate on challenges, and exchange solutions.

+ More

Industry Interest Groups

Connecting engineering leaders in healthcare

14:25 – 14:50

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Connect with folks over shared experiences

Building great software comes with unique challenges in every industry and often, the best insights come from others who are in the same boat. Join our relaxed sessions where you can meet peers working in similar domains to share ideas, collaborate on challenges and exchange solutions.

  • FEATURING
    Liem Pham
    Software EngineerHealthtech 1

    Liem is a France-born, UK-based frontend engineer in early-stage startups. He has spent the last few years in healthcare, building accessible software for NHS patients. His role sees him wearing multiple hats — hopping between teams to develop processes, put out fires, scope new projects, and support others in the engineering community. Since first arranging his lego by colour and size, he’s found his passion in making websites pixel-perfect. When not coding, you’ll find him running, swimming, and hunting for the best bakery in London.

    View Liem’s profile
  • Sally Goble
    Head of Services EngineeringAccurx

    Sally has been working in software development for over twelve years. She is currently the Head of Services Engineering at Accurx, a health tech startup in London, helping solve many of the problems that occur when scaling an organisation. Before that she worked at a diverse range of startups, scaleups and corporations – including Deliveroo the Guardian. She is a regular speaker at conferences.

    View Sally’s profile

Table Talk

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

How do you apply AI safely in regulated environments without blocking developer productivity?

Join facilitated conversations and dive into key issues facing engineering teams.

+ More

Table Talk

How do you apply AI safely in regulated environments without blocking developer productivity?

15:10 – 15:35

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Sponsored by

Capital One

Join facilitated conversations and dive into key issues facing engineering teams

There’s never a single silver bullet for any problem and often you’ll need to combine the ideas of multiple people to find the perfect solution for your team. We’ll be discussing some core issues in the Table Talk sessions, hosted by a group of engineering leaders who are on hand to provide their perspectives and help guide the conversation. You can dip in and out of discussions depending on what interests you the most.

Community Representation Groups

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

Connecting parent leaders

Connect with other leaders who have similar backgrounds and experiences to yours, and build a peer network for support throughout your leadership journey.

+ More

Community Representation Groups

Connecting parent leaders

15:40 – 16:05

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Connect with folks over shared experiences

Everyone’s journey into leadership is tough, but folks who are underrepresented in tech often face their own unique set of challenges. And that can lead to people feeling isolated in their experiences. 

Come to the community representation groups, where you’ll be able to connect with folks who might have similar backgrounds and experiences to yours, and where you’ll be able to build a peer network for support throughout your journey.

  • FEATURING
    Chinonso Ani
    Software EngineerNHS Benchmarking Network (The Benchmarking Network)

    Chinonso is a software engineering leader with over a decade of experience building scalable software systems, data pipelines, and cloud-native platforms across healthcare, e‑commerce, and SaaS products. He is a TOGAF certified Solution Architect and has led software engineering teams as an Engineering Manager and founder. He is also the LeadDev Meetup organiser in Manchester and LeadDev Community Organiser in London, he is passionate about AI-assisted development, integration patterns, and mentoring engineers in high-impact technical delivery.

    View Chinonso’s profile
  • Yanqing Cheng

    Yanqing Cheng is a software engineering leader with over a decade of experience in distributed systems and software quality. Her career spans networking protocol stacks in C, 5G core platforms, and cloud-scale test infrastructure at Metaswitch and Microsoft Azure. She has led teams across complex technical domains while championing psychological safety, neurodiversity inclusion, and developing her people. Currently on a career break raising her baby daughter, she is still deeply interested in how AI is shaping software development practices, particularly around quality and reliability. Outside engineering, she performs musical theatre and plays chess.

    View Yanqing’s profile
  • Rahul Verma
    Engineering LeaderMeta

    Rahul is an Engineering Leader, currently supporting the Privacy team at Meta (Facebook), in London.

    He is driven by the passion to build, grow and retain high performing teams. Rahul also has rich experience in building highly scalable technology solutions in different domains like user data privacy, collaboration platforms (Slack) and travel commerce (Expedia). Rahul loves to drive clarity in vision and goals for the team.

    View Rahul’s profile
  • Sally Lait
    Fractional technology leader and advisor

    Sally Lait specialises in building strong engineering culture, and aims to create supportive and inclusive environments for managers, developers, and teams to thrive and do fantastic technical work.

    Her roles have included helping to change the way the world deals with death as VP of Engineering (plus IT & Data and Insights) at Farewill, prior to which she led Monzo’s web discipline and engineering across Operations through hypergrowth. Other experience involves founding a digital transformation consultancy with clients including the Manor Racing F1 team and RNLI, and working as Head of Technology for a global digital agency.
    Sally’s a strong advocate for building software and teams alike with empathy, responsibility, and accessibility in mind. She’s spoken at events around the world, is on Mastodon at @https://mastodon.social/@sally, and you can find out more about her at sally.dev.

    View Sally’s profile
Connection Zone

Speed coaching

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

Speed coaching with Mathias Meyer

Watch or participate in free 1:1 coaching

+ More

Speed coaching

Speed coaching with Mathias Meyer

09:55 – 10:20

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Watch or participate in free 1:1 coaching with Mathias Meyer.

Learning new information is always great, but sometimes solutions can feel too one-size-fits-all for your specific circumstances. How can advice be applied to a team of 10 or a team of 10,000?

On the other hand, coaching is directly tailored to your specific challenges and the specific environment they exist in. Mathias will be hosting one-on-one coaching sessions with attendees to get into the nuts and bolts of the challenges they’re facing. Come and have a conversation, or peek into the challenges other leaders are facing.

  • FEATURING
    Mathias Meyer
    Founding Partner & Executive CoachThe Intentional Organization

    Mathias is Founding Parter and Executive Coach at The Intentional Organization and executive coach to founders, CTOs, and senior engineering leaders. He supports his clients and their leadership teams in their personal and professional growth as they’re scaling out their business and their departments. Together with his business partner Sara, he’s co-authoring the forthcoming book “The Intentional Organization.” Starting his career as an engineer, Mathias has later worked in founder, CEO, and CTO roles across different companies, including Travis CI and Reaction Commerce.

    View Mathias’s profile

Peer Hangouts

Director+•Experienced Manager

VP hangout

Hang out with other leaders in similar roles.

+ More

Peer Hangouts

VP hangout

10:55 – 11:20

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager

Comparing notes on shared challenges that come with your role has never been easier. Peer Hangouts are 30-minute, casual networking sessions for folks to talk through their experiences and challenges with peers who understand the context they’re working in. Drop in and join a conversation!

  • FEATURING
    Lauren Henry
    VP EngineeringTide

    Lauren Henry is a VP Engineering at Tide.

    View Lauren’s profile
  • Lisa van Gelder
    VP, Engineering

    Lisa has been in software for over 25 years, working in a wide range of companies from early stage startups to established companies like the BBC, Meetup & the Guardian newspaper. She used to debug code, now she debugs teams for a living. She is mostly powered by coffee.

    View Lisa’s profile

Speed coaching

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

Speed coaching with Mathias Meyer

Watch or participate in free 1:1 coaching

+ More

Speed coaching

Speed coaching with Mathias Meyer

10:55 – 11:20

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Watch or participate in free 1:1 coaching with Mathias Meyer.

Learning new information is always great, but sometimes solutions can feel too one-size-fits-all for your specific circumstances. How can advice be applied to a team of 10 or a team of 10,000?

On the other hand, coaching is directly tailored to your specific challenges and the specific environment they exist in. Mathias will be hosting one-on-one coaching sessions with attendees to get into the nuts and bolts of the challenges they’re facing. Come and have a conversation, or peek into the challenges other leaders are facing.

  • FEATURING
    Mathias Meyer
    Founding Partner & Executive CoachThe Intentional Organization

    Mathias is Founding Parter and Executive Coach at The Intentional Organization and executive coach to founders, CTOs, and senior engineering leaders. He supports his clients and their leadership teams in their personal and professional growth as they’re scaling out their business and their departments. Together with his business partner Sara, he’s co-authoring the forthcoming book “The Intentional Organization.” Starting his career as an engineer, Mathias has later worked in founder, CEO, and CTO roles across different companies, including Travis CI and Reaction Commerce.

    View Mathias’s profile

Peer Hangouts

Director+

CTO hangout

Hang out with other leaders in similar roles.

+ More

Peer Hangouts

CTO hangout

11:40 – 12:05

This session is suitable for:

Director+

Comparing notes on shared challenges that come with your role has never been easier. Peer Hangouts are 30-minute, casual networking sessions for folks to talk through their experiences and challenges with peers who understand the context they’re working in. Drop in and join a conversation!

  • FEATURING
    Thomas Johnson
    Co-founder and CTO Multiplayer

    Thomas Johnson is the Co-founder and CTO at Multiplayer, with 30+ years of experience as an engineering leader and backend developer building large-scale distributed software (and robots!)

    View Thomas ‘s profile
  • Crystal Hirschorn
    CTOZoa

    Crystal is an experienced Technology & Data Leader with a career spanning more than 20 years across many sectors. She has held CTO, VP, and Senior Director of Software Engineering, and Principal Engineer roles. She is currently CTO at Zoa who are on a mission to revolutionise the adoption of green energy with intelligent technologies.

    View Crystal’s profile

Solution Swap

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager

My team is being asked to move faster, but we’re already going as fast as we can. What can I do?

Work together to find ways of solving a common problem posed by our moderator.

+ More

Solution Swap

My team is being asked to move faster, but we’re already going as fast as we can. What can I do?

11:40 – 12:05

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager

Your team has been working flat out for the last 4 months delivering a set of projects for your company. The projects are taking longer than originally expected and tensions are beginning to rise, particularly with the Sales and Customer Success teams.

You are spending more and more of your time getting asked about when the projects are going to be delivered.

In your 1-1 with your CEO, they open the conversation by telling you that they need you to get your teams to deliver these projects faster.

How do you respond?

As Engineering Leaders, many of us will recognise this scenario from similar situations that we have encountered in our own careers.

In this session, we explore the different ways that you can respond. We will think about how to turn a conversation like this into an opportunity to build trust, clarity and transparency.

  • FEATURING
    Robbie Clutton
    PrincipalRobbieClutton.com

    Robbie is a software engineering leader with over 18 years as an engineer, GM for consultancy Pivotal Labs in New York and London; VP of Engineering for Snyk; and now an independent consultant and fractional CTO.

    View Robbie’s profile

Solution Swap

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+

An engineer is demanding a promotion, but I don’t think they’re ready. What can I do?

Work together to find ways of solving a common problem posed by our moderator.

+ More

Solution Swap

An engineer is demanding a promotion, but I don’t think they’re ready. What can I do?

12:25 – 12:50

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+

You are approached by a member of your team who says that they think that they deserve to be promoted to be a manager position. You don’t think that they are ready to make this change yet. You are worried that, if you did promote them, that they and the team that they managed would suffer.

What do you do next?

As Engineering Leaders, many of us will recognise this scenario from similar situations that we have encountered in our own careers. In this session we explore how we can turn a conversation like this into an opportunity to build trust, clarity and transparency.

  • FEATURING
    Robbie Clutton
    PrincipalRobbieClutton.com

    Robbie is a software engineering leader with over 18 years as an engineer, GM for consultancy Pivotal Labs in New York and London; VP of Engineering for Snyk; and now an independent consultant and fractional CTO.

    View Robbie’s profile

Meet the author

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

Meet the author: Mathias Meyer

Bring a book and get it signed, or just have a chat with the author.

+ More

Meet the author

Meet the author: Mathias Meyer

13:10 – 13:35

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Bring a book and get it signed, or just have a chat with the author.

  • FEATURING
    Mathias Meyer
    Founding Partner & Executive CoachThe Intentional Organization

    Mathias is Founding Parter and Executive Coach at The Intentional Organization and executive coach to founders, CTOs, and senior engineering leaders. He supports his clients and their leadership teams in their personal and professional growth as they’re scaling out their business and their departments. Together with his business partner Sara, he’s co-authoring the forthcoming book “The Intentional Organization.” Starting his career as an engineer, Mathias has later worked in founder, CEO, and CTO roles across different companies, including Travis CI and Reaction Commerce.

    View Mathias’s profile

Peer Hangouts

Staff+

Staff Engineer hangout

Hang out with other leaders in similar roles.

+ More

Peer Hangouts

Staff Engineer hangout

13:40 – 14:05

This session is suitable for:

Staff+

Comparing notes on shared challenges that come with your role has never been easier. Peer Hangouts are 30-minute, casual networking sessions for folks to talk through their experiences and challenges with peers who understand the context they’re working in. Drop in and join a conversation!

  • FEATURING
    Haley Roberts
    Staff EngineerNeuroID, a part of Experian

    Haley Roberts is a Staff Engineer at NeuroID, a part of Experian.

    View Haley’s profile
  • Ian Homer
    Staff EngineerWise

    Ian is a Staff Engineer at Wise, driving the Development Enablement squad to redefine the intersection of CI/CD and Generative AI. He specialises in building the “golden paths” that allow engineers to innovate at scale, focusing specifically on the safe integration of agentic workflows into the SDLC. With over 20 years of experience, spanning co-founder, tech lead, SRE & product engineer roles, Ian now focuses on scaling technical leadership, coaching engineers to transition from high-performing ICs to high-impact organisational leaders.

    View Ian’s profile
  • Gary Hammett
    Staff Software EngineerPureGym

    Gary is a Staff Software Engineer at PureGym with over a decade of experience and an impressive ability to turn technical chaos into something that looks suspiciously like organisation. He proudly plays the “right‑hand” Staff Engineer role, translating business goals, supporting teams, and trying (against all odds) to make DevEx surveys sound exciting. Gary spends far less time pondering the meaning of build pipelines and far more time tackling the real challenge: helping humans talk to each other effectively. He champions strong engineering culture, AI adoption, and continuous improvement.

    View Gary’s profile

Peer Hangouts

Director+•Experienced Manager

Director hangout

Hang out with other leaders in similar roles.

+ More

Peer Hangouts

Director hangout

14:25 – 14:50

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager

Comparing notes on shared challenges that come with your role has never been easier. Peer Hangouts are 30-minute, casual networking sessions for folks to talk through their experiences and challenges with peers who understand the context they’re working in. Drop in and join a conversation!

  • FEATURING
    Daniela Remogna
    Director of EngineeringCrowdStrike

    Daniela Remogna is a Director of Engineering at CrowdStrike.

    View Daniela’s profile
  • Mark Evans
    Director of EngineeringZopa Bank

    Mark Evans is a Director of Engineering at Zopa Bank.

    View Mark’s profile
  • Mark Harley
    Director of EngineeringWise

    Mark Harley is a Director of Engineering at Wise.

    View Mark’s profile
  • Stephanie Dreyer
    Senior Director of EngineeringPayoneer

    Stephanie Dreyer is a Senior Director of Engineering at Payoneer.

    View Stephanie’s profile
  • Chiranjiv Singh
    Director of Engineering at Checkout.com

    Chiran is a visionary technology leader who excels at building and leading high-performing teams to deliver successful products. He has helped engineering teams navigate through greenfield and brownfield projects, propelled companies to launch innovative products, expand into new markets, and transform struggling initiatives into triumphs.

    He thrives on fostering a culture of continuous improvement and growth, steering the engineering ship through the ever-evolving tech seas with expertise, enthusiasm, and a sprinkle of laughter. He enjoys coaching and mentoring managers and staff+ engineers, leveraging every challenge as a learning opportunity.

    View Chiranjiv ‘s profile
  • Kaushik Chaubal
    Senior Engineering DirectorBlackRock

    Kaushik Chaubal is a Senior Engineering Director, leading the ETF Systems technology team in EMEA within the Global Markets Technology organization at BlackRock. Additionally, he co-leads the strategic ‘GMT AI Program’ focused on solving customer enablement challenges and improving engineering efficiencies within the organization.

    View Kaushik’s profile

Solution Swap

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

My team needs to be given time to fix technical debt but my leadership team won’t listen. What can I do?

Work together to find ways of solving a common problem posed by our moderator.

+ More

Solution Swap

My team needs to be given time to fix technical debt but my leadership team won’t listen. What can I do?

14:25 – 14:50

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Members of your team have been complaining, for some time, that ‘technical debt’ is making it harder and harder for them to work on your code base. You have spoken to your leadership team about slowing down development so that you can pay off some of this ‘technical debt’ on a number of occasions but are always told that you must prioritise the new features that have been committed to on the product roadmap.

You are worried that the experience for your team is only going to get worse and feel powerless to change this dynamic.

What will you do to improve the situation?

As Engineering Leaders, many of us will recognise this scenario from similar situations that we have encountered in our own careers. In this session we explore the different ways that you can respond to a situation like this and how to turn it into an opportunity to build trust, clarity and transparency.

  • FEATURING
    Robbie Clutton
    PrincipalRobbieClutton.com

    Robbie is a software engineering leader with over 18 years as an engineer, GM for consultancy Pivotal Labs in New York and London; VP of Engineering for Snyk; and now an independent consultant and fractional CTO.

    View Robbie’s profile

Speed coaching

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

Speed coaching with Mathias Meyer

Watch or participate in free 1:1 coaching

+ More

Speed coaching

Speed coaching with Mathias Meyer

15:10 – 15:35

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Watch or participate in free 1:1 coaching with Mathias Meyer.

Learning new information is always great, but sometimes solutions can feel too one-size-fits-all for your specific circumstances. How can advice be applied to a team of 10 or a team of 10,000?

On the other hand, coaching is directly tailored to your specific challenges and the specific environment they exist in. Mathias will be hosting one-on-one coaching sessions with attendees to get into the nuts and bolts of the challenges they’re facing. Come and have a conversation, or peek into the challenges other leaders are facing.

  • FEATURING
    Mathias Meyer
    Founding Partner & Executive CoachThe Intentional Organization

    Mathias is Founding Parter and Executive Coach at The Intentional Organization and executive coach to founders, CTOs, and senior engineering leaders. He supports his clients and their leadership teams in their personal and professional growth as they’re scaling out their business and their departments. Together with his business partner Sara, he’s co-authoring the forthcoming book “The Intentional Organization.” Starting his career as an engineer, Mathias has later worked in founder, CEO, and CTO roles across different companies, including Travis CI and Reaction Commerce.

    View Mathias’s profile
Workshop Zone

Workshop

Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

How to train your 𝖽̶𝗋̶𝖺̶𝗀̶𝗈̶𝗇̶ boss

In this practical workshop, learn how to better understand how your manager works, reduce friction, and align more effectively.

  • Lena Reinhard
    Engineering Leader, Organizational Developer, Coach, Facilitator
+ More

Workshop

How to train your 𝖽̶𝗋̶𝖺̶𝗀̶𝗈̶𝗇̶ boss

09:30 – 10:55

This session is suitable for:

Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Having a boss isn’t always as fun as it sounds, and many of us struggle to make the most out of our work with the manager we have, leading to misalignment, friction, and frustration for all parties involved. But how effectively you manage up is a crucial skill, even more as you advance in your career.

That’s why you’ll learn how to make more out of your work with your boss in this workshop with someone who’s been on all sides of this challenge: I’ve managed hundreds of people, had dozens of bosses all from great to terrible, and coached engineers and managers on working better with theirs.

You’ll learn how to reverse engineer the way your boss works and walk away with a practical framework and tools that you can start using immediately and that will improve your work with your manager, including.

This workshop is for anyone who has a manager, no matter if you’re an engineer, technical lead, or manager yourself, you will take away practical approaches to transform your relationship with your manager and accelerate your career growthHow to use your technical expertise to identify hidden system issues by analyzing code patterns, PR structures, and team interactions.

  • FEATURING
    Lena Reinhard
    Engineering Leader, Organizational Developer, Coach, Facilitator

    Lena Reinhard is a seasoned technology leader, currently helping leaders and their teams succeed through her work as a leadership coach, organizational developer, and facilitator. Having served the majority of her 20-year career in leadership roles, such as VP Engineering with CircleCI, Travis CI, and a SaaS startup co-founder & CEO, she has partnered with a variety of remote, hybrid, and co-located companies at all stages, from startups, to scale-ups, corporations, and NGOs. Lena loves to paint, read, and ride her bike around the forests and lakes of her home, Berlin, in Germany. She hosts O’Reilly’s Tech Leadership Tuesday podcast.

    View Lena’s profile

Workshop

Experienced Manager•New Manager

Crisis simulation: Navigating leadership challenges in real-time

A high-pressure crisis simulation for engineering leaders to practise fast decision-making, stakeholder management, and team alignment in realistic scenarios.

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Workshop

Crisis simulation: Navigating leadership challenges in real-time

09:30 – 10:55

This session is suitable for:

Experienced Manager New Manager

In this interactive workshop, you’ll engage in a high-pressure crisis simulation tailored for engineering leadership roles. Drawing from real-world scenarios, you’ll collaborate in teams to practice and share response strategies… but you’ll need to stay on your toes for extra doses of chaos throughout.

This workshop addresses the critical need for engineering leaders to be adept at managing crises that extend beyond technical failures. By simulating real-world challenges, participants will be better equipped to lead their teams through uncertainty, maintain operational continuity, and uphold organizational values under pressure. The session aims to give you a safe way to practice decision-making, communication, and team alignment under pressure, learn from others’ experiences, plus hopefully have some fun with it along the way!

What will you learn?

  • Less about artefacts or resources to take away, more about the experience and relationship building along the way.
  • Strengthen your ability to lead under pressure, make fast trade-offs, and manage stakeholders during fast-evolving tech crises.
  • Fun! A different, high energy format to some other sessions.
  • See how other senior leaders approach the same problem.
  • FEATURING
    Sally Lait
    Fractional technology leader and advisor

    Sally Lait specialises in building strong engineering culture, and aims to create supportive and inclusive environments for managers, developers, and teams to thrive and do fantastic technical work.

    Her roles have included helping to change the way the world deals with death as VP of Engineering (plus IT & Data and Insights) at Farewill, prior to which she led Monzo’s web discipline and engineering across Operations through hypergrowth. Other experience involves founding a digital transformation consultancy with clients including the Manor Racing F1 team and RNLI, and working as Head of Technology for a global digital agency.
    Sally’s a strong advocate for building software and teams alike with empathy, responsibility, and accessibility in mind. She’s spoken at events around the world, is on Mastodon at @https://mastodon.social/@sally, and you can find out more about her at sally.dev.

    View Sally’s profile

Workshop

Experienced Manager•New Manager•Tech Lead

Team building at the age of AI

Explore how AI is reshaping engineering leadership, and learn to create clear team agreements, evolve your role, and build the human skills that matter most.

+ More

Workshop

Team building at the age of AI

09:30 – 10:55

This session is suitable for:

Experienced Manager New Manager Tech Lead

The integration of AI into engineering teams isn’t just changing how work gets done – it’s fundamentally shifting team dynamics, individual roles, and the emotional landscape of leadership. In this interactive workshop, you’ll tackle the real challenges: creating clear agreements about AI use on your team, evolving your leadership approach in the age of AI, and identifying the skills your team needs to succeed in this new reality.. You’ll leave with practical tools including a framework for building your team’s AI charter, strategies for navigating your evolving leadership role, and a clear approach for developing the human skills that become more valuable as AI handles routine work.

What will you learn?

  • Create your team AI charter
    • Establish clear, shared agreements about how your team will use AI tools, what standards you’ll maintain, and where human judgment remains essential.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​
  • Navigate your evolving role
    • Shift from managing tasks to developing capabilities, balancing team members at different AI adoption levels, and leading effectively in the new landscape.
  • Develop the skills your team needs most
    • Identify and intentionally build the critical capabilities like complex problem framing, systems thinking, and cross-functional communication that become more valuable when AI handles routine work.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​
Suzan Bond workshop
  • FEATURING
    Suzan Bond
    Founder & CEOConstellary

    Suzan Bond is the founder and CEO of Constellary. With nearly two decades in tech, Suzan has worked with hundreds of engineering leaders and leadership teams to help them navigate change and meet the challenges of organizational leadership. Her work these days includes preparing new directors for the role, coaching senior engineering leaders and creating cohesive leadership teams.

    View Suzan’s profile

Workshop

Staff+•Tech Lead

Telling the story of technical debt: From case study to business buy-in

Learn how to turn technical debt into a compelling business case, align with organisational goals, and get stakeholders invested in the solution.

+ More

Workshop

Telling the story of technical debt: From case study to business buy-in

11:30 – 12:55

This session is suitable for:

Staff+ Tech Lead

Moving from “complaining about code” to “proposing a business solution” is the most critical shift a technical leader can make.

In this focused session, we will analyse real-world case studies to understand why some technical debt initiatives thrive while others fail. You will learn how to translate technical pain into business risk and opportunity, framing your proposal in a way that aligns with organisational goals.

Leave with a toolkit to communicate the impact of debt so that stakeholders don’t just understand the problem, they want to be part of the solution.

  • FEATURING
    Blanca Garcia Gil
    Principal Engineer, Transformational Coach & FounderStaffPlusEngineer.com

    Blanca is the founder of staffplusengineer.com, leadership coach, workshop facilitator and public speaker.

    Before taking the leap into coaching, she worked as a principal engineer, building resilient data analytics platforms. She spent nearly two decades working for different corporations in a variety of tech roles before making the transition to working with data. Her most recent roles were at the BBC and the fintech startup topi.

    View Blanca’s profile

Workshop

Director+

Reclaim your time, reclaim your leadership

In this transformative workshop, we will challenge the limiting beliefs preventing you from managing your time. You will gain clarity on the power of managing your time, how to increase your impact and identify areas for change. Additionally, you will develop practical strategies to prioritise what truly matters and lead with purpose.

+ More

Workshop

Reclaim your time, reclaim your leadership

11:30 – 12:55

This session is suitable for:

Director+

Do you feel that you are perpetually overwhelmed by meetings, emails, and the demands of others? Do you feel like you’ve lost control of your most valuable asset—your time? If you do, then you are not alone and this is the workshop for you.

In this transformative workshop, we will challenge the limiting beliefs preventing you from managing your time. You will gain clarity on the power of managing your time, how to increase your impact and identify areas for change. Additionally, you will develop practical strategies to prioritise what truly matters and lead with purpose.

You will leave the workshop with a specific set of actions and experiments for you to take back into your work.

  • FEATURING
    Joel Chippindale
    CTO CoachMonkey's Thumb Ltd

    Joel Chippindale is a CTO Coach who supports talented start-up and scale-up CTOs to successfully navigate the many changes in their roles as their companies evolve.

    He also has over 20 years experience building, scaling and leading software development teams, including CTO roles at Econsultancy, FutureLearn and Unmade.

    View Joel’s profile

Workshop

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

Product sense for product engineering with AI

Build stronger product judgment in the AI era. Learn how to decide what is truly worth building before writing code.

  • Oana May MOATCRAFT™
    FAANG Product Leadership Coach, Founder of MOATCRAFT™
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Workshop

Product sense for product engineering with AI

11:30 – 12:55

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

80% of the features built are barely or never used (Pendo Report).

Now, AI makes it easier to build even more of the wrong things. While for engineers, the real advantage is no longer just execution, but judgment. Knowing what is worth building: why it matters for customers, for the business, in the market, etc.

In this interactive session, Oana May, ex-Meta and founder of MOATCRAFT, will share the practical product sense system she has used to coach 500+ product leaders in the Bay Area, NY, Seattle, etc.

You will learn:

  • How business and product leaders decide what is worth investing in
  • Why many ideas fail to gain traction
  • How to bring structure to ambiguous decisions before any code is written

Through live collaborative exercises, you will practice applying this framework in real time.

You will leave with practical tools to sharpen your own product sense, coach stronger decision-making on your team, and help engineers move from execution-focused thinking to business-aligned problem solving.

  • FEATURING
    Oana May
    FAANG Product Leadership Coach, Founder of MOATCRAFT™MOATCRAFT™

    Oana May is an ex-Meta leader, FAANG product coach, and 3x founder. She recently launched MOATCRAFT™, where she helps software developers learn to choose what problems are worth solving and make better business-aligned decisions. Using the systems she developed coaching 500+ product leaders across the Bay Area, New York, and Seattle, she teaches builders how to navigate ambiguity and sharpen their judgment, the key skill in a world where AI is writing the code.
    Her background includes Harvard Business School and a track record of seeing around corners as a founder and product leader, and helping builders earn promotions, land dream roles, and think beyond execution into making smarter bets.

    Additional bio options: https://docs.google.com/document/d/12Y2qtSv0Rt6NGFvZZHWA7KIiL9WSasoqZL1C4QIkWrE/edit?usp=sharing

    View Oana’s profile

Workshop

Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

Fundamentals of distributed system resilience

Explore why distributed systems fail and learn practical resilience principles to design systems that withstand real-world complexity.

  • Sam Newman Sam Newman & Associates
    Independent Tech Consultant & Author
+ More

Workshop

Fundamentals of distributed system resilience

14:10 – 15:35

This session is suitable for:

Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Distributed systems are all around us. You are probably building one without realizing it!

What is it about distributed systems that makes them painful to deal with? And how can you make sure the systems you create are resilient in the face of the myriad ways in which they can fail?

In this workshop, you will explore the nature of resilience in the context of distributed systems, and come away with some foundational knowledge that will help you no matter what type of system you are building.

Please note, this is not a coding workshop – it is a discussion-based workshop where as a group we explore architectural and technical aspects. Laptops are totally optional!

  • FEATURING
    Sam Newman
    Independent Tech Consultant & AuthorSam Newman & Associates
    Sam Newman is an independent consultant who loves solving problems with technology. Focusing primarily in the areas of cloud, microservice architecture and continuous delivery, Sam works with companies big and small all over the world. He is also an experienced conference speaker, and author of the O’Reilly books Monolith To Microservices, Building Microservices, and the forthcoming Building Resilient Distributed Systems.
    View Sam’s profile

Workshop

Experienced Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

Diagnosing performance problems without the guesswork

Learn to diagnose real performance bottlenecks using flamegraphs, building fast intuition to identify costly queries, GC pressure, and hidden overhead.

+ More

Workshop

Diagnosing performance problems without the guesswork

14:10 – 15:35

This session is suitable for:

Experienced Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Your app is slow. You add caching, tweak a database index, maybe throw more hardware at it. Sometimes it works, but mostly you’re guessing. This workshop changes that.

You’ll learn to use flamegraphs, the single most effective tool for understanding where your application actually spends time. Through live demos and interactive diagnosis of real-world profiles, you’ll build the intuition to spot N+1 queries, GC pressure, serialisation costs, and hidden middleware overhead in seconds.

We’ll profile in Ruby (Vernier) and Go (pprof), proving the mental model transfers across languages. You’ll also get an AI-assisted prompt template that cuts initial triage from 20 minutes to 2.

You’ll leave with a concrete skill, a reference card, and a specific task to try Monday morning. No vendor lock-in, no theory.

  • FEATURING
    Elena Tanasoiu
    Staff Software EngineerGitHub

    Elena Tanasoiu is a Staff Engineer on GitHub’s Performance Engineering team. She spends her time making one of the world’s largest Ruby on Rails applications faster by profiling production traffic, diagnosing bottlenecks, and occasionally convincing teams they don’t need more hardware. She has a fondness for flamegraphs because they never lie.

    View Elena’s profile

Workshop

Director+

Leading through change

Practical frameworks to diagnose change, align initiatives with culture, and turn uncertainty into deliberate action that drives execution, momentum, and lasting organizational transformation.

+ More

Workshop

Leading through change

14:10 – 15:35

This session is suitable for:

Director+

Sponsored by

Change happens to us. Change happens because of us.

The difference between reactive survival and intentional transformation defines great tech leaders. This interactive workshop will explore both how we understand and respond to change, but also how we strategize and make our own changes happening. You will leave with:

  • A diagnosis of the type and scale of change you are facing
  • A design for change initiatives that align with your engineering culture
  • Concrete actions to drive execution
  • This session is designed for leaders who want to move from managing change to mastering it
  • FEATURING
    Hywel Carver
    CTO-turned-FounderSkiller Whale

    Hywel wrote his first program in C aged 9. After graduating with an MEng from Cambridge, he dropped out of his PhD programme to co-found his first start-up. Today, Hywel is Skiller Whale’s Co-Founder and CEO. He runs a dinner club for CTOs, a podcast for tech leaders called ‘Primarily Context-Based’, and is designing and building his own 8-bit computer for playing Pong. In his 12+ year career, he’s been building and scaling start-ups. With Skiller Whale, he is drawing on that experience to solve the biggest problem he faced as a CTO: learning for engineering teams.

    View Hywel’s profile

Workshop

Staff+•Tech Lead

Translating up: Engineering advocacy for the C-suite

Learn to translate engineering ideas into executive language that reframes risk, secures buy-in, and accelerates smart experimentation.

+ More

Workshop

Translating up: Engineering advocacy for the C-suite

14:10 – 15:35

This session is suitable for:

Staff+ Tech Lead

Sponsored by

CircleCI Logo LeadDev

You know what needs to change. You see the technical opportunities clearly. But when you bring initiatives to executives, they hear “risky change” not “controlled experiment.” The result? Great ideas die in planning, technical debt compounds, and your team runs obsolete processes while competitors experiment their way forward.

The gap isn’t your technical competence—it’s translation. Executives operate in a different context with different constraints and accountabilities. They evaluate initiatives using frameworks like opportunity cost, customer impact, and risk management. Most staff+ engineers never learn to speak this language.

In this workshop, CircleCI CTO Rob Zuber pulls back the curtain on how executives actually evaluate technical initiatives. You’ll learn how to better communicate and leverage technical frameworks to shift perception from “this sounds risky” to “this is a smart opportunity.” Discover how to frame experimentation as hypothesis testing, turn one-way doors into two-way doors, and position engineering investments using the same frameworks executives use for any strategic decision.

You’ll leave with practical tools to drive better alignment between your engineering and the board so you can advocate for and focus on outcomes that drive the business forward.

  • FEATURING
    Rob Zuber
    CTOCircleCI

    Rob Zuber is a 20-year veteran of software startups; a three-time founder, and a five-time CTO. Since joining CircleCI, Rob has seen the company through its Series F funding and delivered on product innovation at scale while leading a team of 150+ engineers distributed worldwide.

    View Rob’s profile
SolutionS ZONE

Next Steps AMA

Staff+•Tech Lead

Stepping into the role of Staff Engineer

Dedicated sessions on how to take the next step in your career for stepping into the role of a Staff Engineer

+ More

Next Steps AMA

Stepping into the role of Staff Engineer

09:55 – 10:20

This session is suitable for:

Staff+ Tech Lead

Dedicated sessions on how to take the next step in your career for stepping into the role of a Staff Engineer

  • FEATURING
    Haley Roberts
    Staff EngineerNeuroID, a part of Experian

    Haley Roberts is a Staff Engineer at NeuroID, a part of Experian.

    View Haley’s profile
  • Ian Homer
    Staff EngineerWise

    Ian is a Staff Engineer at Wise, driving the Development Enablement squad to redefine the intersection of CI/CD and Generative AI. He specialises in building the “golden paths” that allow engineers to innovate at scale, focusing specifically on the safe integration of agentic workflows into the SDLC. With over 20 years of experience, spanning co-founder, tech lead, SRE & product engineer roles, Ian now focuses on scaling technical leadership, coaching engineers to transition from high-performing ICs to high-impact organisational leaders.

    View Ian’s profile
  • Alex Canessa
    Fractional Head of EngineeringSelf employed

    Alex Canessa works fractionally across multiple organisations as Head of Engineering at Fortivex, Agent Ecosystem Support at the MACH Alliance, and Tech Lead for Unomundi. He started as a developer and still thinks like one, with a strong focus on architecture, clarity, and delivery. His work explores composable systems and emerging agent patterns in real product environments. He is a dad, practises improv theatre, and has a long-standing fascination with etymology.

    View Alex’s profile
  • Gary Hammett
    Staff Software EngineerPureGym

    Gary is a Staff Software Engineer at PureGym with over a decade of experience and an impressive ability to turn technical chaos into something that looks suspiciously like organisation. He proudly plays the “right‑hand” Staff Engineer role, translating business goals, supporting teams, and trying (against all odds) to make DevEx surveys sound exciting. Gary spends far less time pondering the meaning of build pipelines and far more time tackling the real challenge: helping humans talk to each other effectively. He champions strong engineering culture, AI adoption, and continuous improvement.

    View Gary’s profile

Demo

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

Live demo: Gitkraken

Explore solutions for your technical issues.

+ More

Demo

Live demo: Gitkraken

10:30 – 10:35

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Sponsored by

GitKraken LeadDev

Explore solutions for your technical issues.

Make the most of your breaks with the demo stage sessions, where leading tech providers will showcase their innovative solutions in informative and concise presentations. Each carefully curated 10 minute demo will show the very best engineering solutions available.

Demo

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

Live demo: Octopus Deploy

Explore solutions for your technical issues.

+ More

Demo

Live demo: Octopus Deploy

10:30 – 10:35

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Sponsored by

Octopus Deploy LeadDev

Explore solutions for your technical issues.

Make the most of your breaks with the demo stage sessions, where leading tech providers will showcase their innovative solutions in informative and concise presentations. Each carefully curated 10 minute demo will show the very best engineering solutions available.

Demo

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

Live demo: Runpod

Explore solutions for your technical issues.

+ More

Demo

Live demo: Runpod

10:45 – 10:50

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Sponsored by

Runpod LeadDev

Explore solutions for your technical issues.

Make the most of your breaks with the demo stage sessions, where leading tech providers will showcase their innovative solutions in informative and concise presentations. Each carefully curated 10 minute demo will show the very best engineering solutions available.

Demo

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

Live demo: Qodo

Explore solutions for your technical issues.

+ More

Demo

Live demo: Qodo

10:45 – 10:50

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Sponsored by

Qodo LeadDev

Explore solutions for your technical issues.

Make the most of your breaks with the demo stage sessions, where leading tech providers will showcase their innovative solutions in informative and concise presentations. Each carefully curated 10 minute demo will show the very best engineering solutions available.

Next Steps AMA

Director+•Experienced Manager

Becoming a VP of Engineering

Dedicated sessions on how to take the next step in your career for Becoming a VP of Engineering

+ More

Next Steps AMA

Becoming a VP of Engineering

11:40 – 12:05

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager

Dedicated sessions on how to take the next step in your career for Becoming a VP of Engineering

  • FEATURING
    Lauren Henry
    VP EngineeringTide

    Lauren Henry is a VP Engineering at Tide.

    View Lauren’s profile
  • Steve Janaway
    VP EngineeringBloom & Wild

    Steve is the VP of Engineering at Bloom & Wild, Europe’s leading online flower company and home to the Bloom & Wild, bloomon and Bergamotte brands. He is a passionate software engineering leader with a proven track record in building and leading successful teams across diverse industries including social, retail, and telecom. He is a regular speaker and writer on leadership and software, with a keen interest in leveraging technology to drive innovation and create sustainable, happy and high-performing teams.

    View profile
  • Alex Canessa
    Fractional Head of EngineeringSelf employed

    Alex Canessa works fractionally across multiple organisations as Head of Engineering at Fortivex, Agent Ecosystem Support at the MACH Alliance, and Tech Lead for Unomundi. He started as a developer and still thinks like one, with a strong focus on architecture, clarity, and delivery. His work explores composable systems and emerging agent patterns in real product environments. He is a dad, practises improv theatre, and has a long-standing fascination with etymology.

    View Alex’s profile
  • Lisa van Gelder
    VP, Engineering

    Lisa has been in software for over 25 years, working in a wide range of companies from early stage startups to established companies like the BBC, Meetup & the Guardian newspaper. She used to debug code, now she debugs teams for a living. She is mostly powered by coffee.

    View Lisa’s profile

The Big Debate

How will we deal with the new drudgery of AI-generated code?

The Big Debate: Engineering at the edge of AI examines the hidden challenges of AI-generated code. Industry leaders discuss how increased code volume creates new bottlenecks in review, testing, and security, and explore how teams can manage emerging operational friction while maintaining quality, scalability, and sustainable engineering practices in AI-driven workflows.

+ More

The Big Debate

How will we deal with the new drudgery of AI-generated code?

11:40 – 12:05

AI promises faster development cycles and increased productivity, but many teams are discovering new forms of friction in its wake. More generated code means more to review, test, secure, and maintain. The bottlenecks haven’t disappeared; they’ve shifted.

How do you prevent review overload when code volume explodes? What happens when testing and security can’t keep pace? And how do you stop productivity gains from turning into operational drag, where humans are left with the repetitive, high-responsibility work AI can’t do?

Join this discussion as we explore the “new drudgery” emerging in AI-driven engineering environments. 

Leaders will share their thoughts on invisible toil, evolving bottlenecks, and how to design systems that scale without burning out teams or reducing engineers to code custodians.

Discussions include:

  • Review and testing bottlenecks in AI-heavy workflows
  • Navigating security and compliance blind spots
  • Facing invisible toil and oversight fatigue
  • Designing guardrails that don’t slow teams down

Demo

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

Live demo: PagerDuty

Explore solutions for your technical issues.

+ More

Demo

Live demo: PagerDuty

12:40 – 12:44

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Sponsored by

PagerDuty

Explore solutions for your technical issues.

Make the most of your breaks with the demo stage sessions, where leading tech providers will showcase their innovative solutions in informative and concise presentations. Each carefully curated 10 minute demo will show the very best engineering solutions available.

Solution Talk

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

Solutions stage talk by Coder

Sponsor-led 10-minute talks highlighting tools and solutions for real-world engineering problems.

+ More

Solution Talk

Solutions stage talk by Coder

12:45 – 12:50

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Sponsored by

Coder LeadDev

Join these 10-minute talks to explore how our partners are helping teams tackle real-world engineering challenges. Each session shares practical examples, lessons learned, and insights into the decisions behind the solutions — giving you ideas you can take back to your own teams and systems.

Demo

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

Live demo: Temporal

Explore solutions for your technical issues.

+ More

Demo

Live demo: Temporal

13:00 – 13:05

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Sponsored by

Temporal LeadDev

Explore solutions for your technical issues.

Make the most of your breaks with the demo stage sessions, where leading tech providers will showcase their innovative solutions in informative and concise presentations. Each carefully curated 10 minute demo will show the very best engineering solutions available.

Demo

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

Live demo: DX

Explore solutions for your technical issues.

+ More

Demo

Live demo: DX

13:10 – 13:14

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Sponsored by

Explore solutions for your technical issues.

Make the most of your breaks with the demo stage sessions, where leading tech providers will showcase their innovative solutions in informative and concise presentations. Each carefully curated 10 minute demo will show the very best engineering solutions available.

Solution Talk

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

Solutions stage talk by Prima

Sponsor-led 10-minute talks highlighting tools and solutions for real-world engineering problems.

+ More

Solution Talk

Solutions stage talk by Prima

13:15 – 13:20

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Sponsored by

Prima LeadDev

Join these 10-minute talks to explore how our partners are helping teams tackle real-world engineering challenges. Each session shares practical examples, lessons learned, and insights into the decisions behind the solutions — giving you ideas you can take back to your own teams and systems.

Solution Talk

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

Solutions stage talk by Retool

Sponsor-led 10-minute talks highlighting tools and solutions for real-world engineering problems.

+ More

Solution Talk

Solutions stage talk by Retool

13:45 – 13:50

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Sponsored by

Retool LeadDev

Join these 10-minute talks to explore how our partners are helping teams tackle real-world engineering challenges. Each session shares practical examples, lessons learned, and insights into the decisions behind the solutions — giving you ideas you can take back to your own teams and systems.

Next Steps AMA

Director+

The Path to CTO

Dedicated sessions on how to take the next step in your career for the path to CTO

+ More

Next Steps AMA

The Path to CTO

14:25 – 14:50

This session is suitable for:

Director+

Dedicated sessions on how to take the next step in your career for the path to CTO

  • FEATURING
    Alex Canessa
    Fractional Head of EngineeringSelf employed

    Alex Canessa works fractionally across multiple organisations as Head of Engineering at Fortivex, Agent Ecosystem Support at the MACH Alliance, and Tech Lead for Unomundi. He started as a developer and still thinks like one, with a strong focus on architecture, clarity, and delivery. His work explores composable systems and emerging agent patterns in real product environments. He is a dad, practises improv theatre, and has a long-standing fascination with etymology.

    View Alex’s profile
  • Thomas Johnson
    Co-founder and CTO Multiplayer

    Thomas Johnson is the Co-founder and CTO at Multiplayer, with 30+ years of experience as an engineering leader and backend developer building large-scale distributed software (and robots!)

    View Thomas ‘s profile
  • Crystal Hirschorn
    CTOZoa

    Crystal is an experienced Technology & Data Leader with a career spanning more than 20 years across many sectors. She has held CTO, VP, and Senior Director of Software Engineering, and Principal Engineer roles. She is currently CTO at Zoa who are on a mission to revolutionise the adoption of green energy with intelligent technologies.

    View Crystal’s profile
  • Nicky Wrightson
    CTOBeZero Carbon

    Nicky is the CTO at BeZero Carbon. She has been leading teams for more than 15 years, across a wide range of industries: travel, banking, media and telecommunications. She passionately drives forward cloud native architectures and approaches that allow engineers to deliver business value quickly whilst also reducing the support overhead needed for complex distributed systems.

    View Nicky’s profile

The Big Debate

Experienced Manager•New Manager•Tech Lead

What makes an effective EM in the AI era?

The Big Debate: Engineering at the edge of AI explores how AI is reshaping engineering leadership. In this session, industry leaders discuss the evolving role of the Engineering Manager, examining the balance between technical depth, coaching, and organisational leadership as AI transforms team workflows, accountability, and expectations of effective engineering management.

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The Big Debate

What makes an effective EM in the AI era?

14:25 – 15:05

This session is suitable for:

Experienced Manager New Manager Tech Lead

As AI tools take on more of the hands-on execution, the role of the Engineering Manager is evolving. But in which direction? Should EMs become more technical to guide AI-enabled work or double down on coaching and organisational leadership?

Balancing delivery, mentoring, stakeholder alignment, and technical credibility has always been complex. In AI-augmented teams, the expectations are shifting again.

Join the conversation as experienced leaders unpack how “highly effective” engineering management is changing. They’ll discuss how the EM role is evolving, where desired skillsets are expanding, and how to stay relevant as workflows and team structures transform.

Discussions include:

  • The technical depth required of modern EMs
  • How AI is reshaping expectations of leadership and oversight
  • Managing accountability at scale
  • What “quality” means when execution is increasingly automated

Next Steps AMA

Director+•Experienced Manager

Diving into the role of Engineering Director

Dedicated sessions on how to take the next step in your career for diving into the role of Engineering Director

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Next Steps AMA

Diving into the role of Engineering Director

15:10 – 15:35

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager

Dedicated sessions on how to take the next step in your career for diving into the role of Engineering Director

  • FEATURING
    Daniela Remogna
    Director of EngineeringCrowdStrike

    Daniela Remogna is a Director of Engineering at CrowdStrike.

    View Daniela’s profile
  • Mark Harley
    Director of EngineeringWise

    Mark Harley is a Director of Engineering at Wise.

    View Mark’s profile
  • Stephanie Dreyer
    Senior Director of EngineeringPayoneer

    Stephanie Dreyer is a Senior Director of Engineering at Payoneer.

    View Stephanie’s profile
  • Kaushik Chaubal
    Senior Engineering DirectorBlackRock

    Kaushik Chaubal is a Senior Engineering Director, leading the ETF Systems technology team in EMEA within the Global Markets Technology organization at BlackRock. Additionally, he co-leads the strategic ‘GMT AI Program’ focused on solving customer enablement challenges and improving engineering efficiencies within the organization.

    View Kaushik’s profile
  • Simone Casciaroli
    Head of EngineeringKraken

    Simone Casciaroli is a technology leader who specialises in enabling autonomous teams to continuously and incrementally ship value to customers. Simone has spent the last two decades leading product and platform teams across startups and scale-ups (Now TV, Babylon Health, Onto, Doccla) with roles at the intersection of delivery, product, and technology. Simone has co-founded two health and personal development startups and recently joined Kraken Technology as Head of Engineering.

    View Simone’s profile

The agenda is subject to change as sessions are confirmed. Timings will be added closer to the event.