Meet the speakers

Engineering Manager and co-founder, are both titles Taylor Poindexter holds. She is an Engineering Manager at Spotify and cofounder of Black Code Collective — an organization that strives to create a safe space for Black engineers to grow their skills and network. In her spare time, she enjoys sharing her knowledge of whiskey with anyone that will listen.

Quincy has always had a passion for technology and the industry, from the time he built his own personal computer from scratch to editing his Myspace page with basic HTML and CSS. Since attending an intensive program to learn web development, Quincy began his career at Comcast as an engineer and continues as an Engineering Manager today.

Boomie Odumade is a dynamic senior software engineering leader with over 20 years of experience in technology, including building teams, scaling systems, and growing organizations. She also provides career coaching. She was most recently Senior Director of Engineering at a small company. Previously, she led engineering teams at NPR, Capital One, and Accenture, and co-founded Nexercise, a mobile fitness startup. Boomie is passionate about mentoring youth and supporting future STEM leaders. She holds a Bachelor’s in Mechanical Engineering, a Master’s in Computer Science, and an MBA from Wharton.

Caroline Lacoste is a Director of Engineering at Native Instruments, where she leads the engineering teams responsible for the development of iZotope products. These AI-powered audio software products for Audio Restoration, Mixing, and Mastering provide high-quality tools for professionals in major film and TV studios, music producers, and mixing engineers. Prior to her work in the audio industry, she spent 13 years in the travel industry, including four years as a Software Engineering Manager at Amadeus Boston. In this capacity, she spearheaded a team to design and deliver solutions for airlines and travel agencies in the Americas. With a strong academic background, she holds a Ph.D. in Image Processing.

Jared has spent his career improving access to effective, equitable, engaging learning experiences. His talks and writing on career development, education technology, and engineering management have been featured in TEDx, LeadDev, Developer Week, and EdSurge. Jared serves as Senior Director of Engineering at Brilliant, where he helps shape the future of learning. Prior, he was the first employee and founding engineer at Hellosaurus, which he grew through acquisition, and built the Growth Engineering team at DataCamp. Jared lives in NYC where he advises early stage founders and engineering leaders, roots for the Yankees, and consumes an irresponsible amount of pastries.

Spence Taylor is a Lead Developer Relations Engineer at New Relic, based in Los Angeles. Before his tech career, he was a US Navy sailor and a fine dining chef. He is passionate about data, cooking, and exploring the world.

Oakley is a Principal Software Engineer at Walmart Global Tech who focuses on solving big problems and building high-performing teams. He spends his free time with his wife and three children, fishing, and enjoying the outdoors.

Ishita is a software engineering team lead at Bloomberg, building multimedia workflows with her team that make photos, videos, and documents seamless to access across the Terminal and Bloomberg.com.

Known for fostering inclusive, high-performing teams, she blends technical expertise with a global perspective shaped by living and working across APAC, EMEA, and the Americas.

With empathy, adaptability, and a drive to turn ideas into impact, Ishita brings energy to every challenge. Outside work, she finds inspiration sketching portraits or chasing panoramic views.

Matt Zukowski is the Engineering Director at Cedar.

As an engineering leader in the EdTech space, Iswarya combines technical expertise with empathy and over a decade of experience to deliver innovative solutions, scale engineering teams, and drive product strategy. She is committed to continuous learning, mentoring the next generation, and fostering inclusive environments where everyone can thrive. Outside of work, she enjoys traveling, exploring new cultures, and life as a mom of two.

Shelly is an experienced engineering leader who is passionate about building a strong and supportive engineering culture that fosters diversity and growth. She is currently the Director of Engineering at CircleCI.

Fiona is the cofounder of Frank & Eddy Leadership. She is passionate about fostering authentic, self-aware, and collaborative leadership teams through coaching and facilitating. Prior to founding Frank & Eddy, she spent 7 years at Spotify supporting product and engineering leaders (Sr, Director, VP) to lead through fast-paced change, and building a high-performing senior leadership team in a large Platform Engineering organization (for a period, leading a cross-functional organization of 130 people).

Alia is the cofounder of Frank & Eddy Leadership and is passionate about building collaborative cross-functional product development teams. She is a coach and facilitator, and has been a founder and engineer. Prior to founding Frank & Eddy, she coached at Spotify during 7 years of explosive growth, where she supported product and engineering leaders (Sr, Director, VP) to lead through continual change.

Tess Shapiro is an engineering leader with experience in ad tech, affiliate marketing, and subscription services at Conde Nast. She is a problem solver at heart, and thrives on building things — whether it’s software, teams, or relationships. Tess lives in New York City with her husband and 1 year old baby, Walker.

Philip Lee is a Principal Engineer at ev.energy – making the world’s electric car charging simpler, greener, and cheaper. He spends his time thinking about how to become a better senior IC – hello LeadDev! – as well as indulging in too many hobbies.

Seth is a Senior Software Engineer at Google with over a decade of experience. For the past four years, he’s been a Technical Lead, currently guiding a team of ten engineers. His professional journey is centered on technical leadership, a passion he shares by mentoring other Technical Leads to enhance their effectiveness. In his free time, he enjoys spending time with his family and focusing on fitness.

Alexandra Batchelor is the Founder & CEO of Pebble.

Alia is the cofounder of Frank & Eddy Leadership and is passionate about building collaborative cross-functional product development teams. She is a coach and facilitator, and has been a founder and engineer. Prior to founding Frank & Eddy, she coached at Spotify during 7 years of explosive growth, where she supported product and engineering leaders (Sr, Director, VP) to lead through continual change.

Fiona is the cofounder of Frank & Eddy Leadership. She is passionate about fostering authentic, self-aware, and collaborative leadership teams through coaching and facilitating. Prior to founding Frank & Eddy, she spent 7 years at Spotify supporting product and engineering leaders (Sr, Director, VP) to lead through fast-paced change, and building a high-performing senior leadership team in a large Platform Engineering organization (for a period, leading a cross-functional organization of 130 people).

Sam Richard, better known as Snugug throughout the Internet, is a Senior Developer Relations Enginner for Chrome at Google. He has a background leading software architecture, development, design, and strategy for the web at Fortune 100 companies and loves being able to share the knowledge he’s gained doing so with anyone interested through teaching, speaking, and open source work. Outside of work, Sam is an avid amateur chef, foodie, and photographer, and often combines all three.

Divya Chandrasekar is a team lead at Bloomberg, where she manages FXGO Orders, one of the trading platforms within FXGO. She joined Bloomberg after earning a master’s in computer engineering from The University of Florida and has since held multiple engineering roles across the company. Known for her empathetic, non-authoritative leadership style, Divya is passionate about developing talent and building psychologically safe teams. She has presented at internal conferences and contributed to panel discussions on a range of topics. Additionally, she is a certified mental health advocate who believes emotional intelligence and empathy are key to effective, resilient leadership.

With over 10 years of experience spanning startups, established tech firms and research labs, Ayush brings a versatile background in software and research engineering. Passionate about platform engineering and building impactful technology using AI, they have been leading projects focused on making software reliable, secure and performant at scale. Currently, they work in Agents platform and tools team at Microsoft that enables developers to build next generation of applications seamlessly for wide variety of business use cases.

Sally is a Fullstack Engineer with over 10 years of big-tech, product, studio, agency, and start-up experience, delivering world-class digital.

After 11 years as an engineering manager and leader at Airbnb, Jessica has switched to being a career coach. Most recently she managed the GraphQL unified data access layer product infra team. She has given talks around the world about Service-Oriented Architecture migrations and Managing Remote Engineering Teams. She holds a Masters in CS from Stanford and a Bachelors from UCLA.

Francisco Estevez is a Software Engineering Manager at VCS HR.

Fiona is the cofounder of Frank & Eddy Leadership. She is passionate about fostering authentic, self-aware, and collaborative leadership teams through coaching and facilitating. Prior to founding Frank & Eddy, she spent 7 years at Spotify supporting product and engineering leaders (Sr, Director, VP) to lead through fast-paced change, and building a high-performing senior leadership team in a large Platform Engineering organization (for a period, leading a cross-functional organization of 130 people).

Alex Karp is an engineering leader with a focus on people-first management and ethical management in a late-stage capitalist society. He is also the author of “Running Start: How to get a job in tech, keep that job, and thrive”. He is currently an engineering manager at Thumbtack, and lives near Boston in the US with his wife, adorable son, and his mischievous cockapoo.

In his spare time, he loves to play the piano, read YA fantasy fiction, and bring back the 1920s by dancing Lindy Hop.

Carly Fleming (she/her) is currently a Deputy Director in the Data Systems and Analytics department overseeing the technical teams focused on building products that will help working people win. She has made a career of establishing the infrastructure needed for data teams to provide strategic value to their organization by taking a wide-range of approaches to problem solving: analytics at a large ad agency, product management at NGPVAN, data engineering at AFL-CIO, and Director of a NYC agency using data to fight against tenant harassment. Carly lives in Brooklyn, NY. She enjoys books, bikes, board games, and apparently the letter B.

Sebastiano Armeli is an engineering leader currently at Meta. He has previously served as a Director of Engineering at Upwork and held leadership roles at companies such as Pinterest, PayPal, Snap, and Spotify. His work has spanned diverse domains including shopping, crypto, messaging, video creation, and ads.

Sebastiano is passionate about building healthy engineering cultures, mentoring the next generation of leaders, and supporting teams through periods of growth and change. He mentors engineering managers and senior engineers, enjoys speaking at conferences, and shares his perspectives on leadership in his Substack, The Healthy Engineering Leader. He also serves on the board of a community-owned grocery store.

In all his work, Sebastiano takes a pragmatic, people-first approach to leadership, focusing on clarity, continuous improvement, and long-term impact.

Tosha is a Technical Program Manager and founder of NerdFrame, a consultancy specializing in fractional PMO and engineering operations. She helps teams bridge the gap between strategy and execution, addressing gaps in expertise, outcomes, or processes. Tosha brings over 14 years of experience from leading organizations including NASA, Visa, GE, and LinkedIn, where she has delivered impactful technical initiatives and driven organizational success. Through NerdFrame, she partners with organizations to strengthen their delivery capabilities and align technical execution with business objectives. When not driving innovation in the tech space, she enjoys spending time with her rescue dog, traveling, reading, and connecting with friends.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Carlos Rymer is a Senior Engineering Manager at LinkedIn. He is responsible for building technology that empowers marketers to reach and engage audiences that can benefit from LinkedIn’s products. He has a background in building content publishing systems, big data analytics, and cloud computing. As an engineering leader, he invests in growing talent in and out of work, driving focus on mission, and nurturing a culture that promotes transparency, engineering excellence, and doing good.

David is a Senior Staff Site Reliability Engineer at H-E-B Grocery in Austin, Texas, where he helps keep systems and engineers resilient and Texans fed. He spends his time guiding teams through service reliability and incident response challenges. He enjoys untangling messy socio-technical knots and empowering engineers to solve problems on their own. At H-E-B, he is working to expand possibilities for people on the StaffPlus individual contributor growth path.

Veronika Pliusnina is a seasoned Software Engineering Leader and Staff SDET with over 15 years of experience driving quality strategy, test automation, and engineering excellence across web and mobile platforms. She has led cross-functional initiatives at companies including Peloton and Cash App, where she built scalable frameworks, unified testing strategies, and mentored engineers into senior roles. With a background spanning QA to Staff leadership, Veronika is passionate about elevating developer productivity and customer experience through quality-first practices. She also co-hosts the Engineering Quality podcast, where they explore modern approaches to testing, leadership, and building resilient teams.

Ajay is a Staff Software Engineer at Coinbase, where he focuses on databases, analytics, and storage infrastructure. His primary role is building high-performance scalable distributed systems. His specific expertise spans several key areas including: technical architecture, JVM optimization, SQL analytics, and financial technology systems.

Prior to Coinbase, Ajay had over fifteen years experience as a technology leader at organizations like Meta and Goldman Sachs. He is also a Presto committer working on the open-source distributed SQL query engine for big data.

After 11 years as an engineering manager and leader at Airbnb, Jessica has switched to being a career coach. Most recently she managed the GraphQL unified data access layer product infra team. She has given talks around the world about Service-Oriented Architecture migrations and Managing Remote Engineering Teams. She holds a Masters in CS from Stanford and a Bachelors from UCLA.

Lesley Cordero is currently a Staff Engineer at The New York Times. She has spent the majority of her career on edtech teams as an engineer, including Google for Education and edtech startups.

She is primarily focused on platform engineering and reliability management, particularly in the observability space. Her leadership style focuses on cultivating a culture that builds with the most vulnerable employees in mind first, and she shows care for others by holding them accountable to the best versions of themselves – and by buying them the occasional bubble tea.

Yan Wang is an engineering leader at Bloomberg, where he leads a team developing automated trading workflows for financial institutions. He is passionate about building high-performance, scalable software that addresses the critical needs of the financial industry while fostering resilient, high-performing teams. With a focus on both technical excellence and leadership growth, Yan is dedicated to preparing teams to meet the evolving challenges of the industry.

Jenny Gu is a Senior Software Engineering Manager at Bloomberg LP, where she leads the Workflow Services team within the Enterprise Products Platform. She focuses on building scalable, high-performance systems that power critical workflows for global financial clients. With deep experience in software engineering and technical leadership, Jenny is passionate about driving innovation, growing diverse teams, and delivering solutions that bridge technology and business needs

Mallika Rao is an engineering leader with deep experience in designing and operating large-scale distributed systems, including search infrastructure. She brings a systems-thinking approach to problem-solving and is passionate about building resilient, transparent platforms that empower teams to move fast without compromising stability. Outside of work, she’s equally inspired by the structures of mathematics and the improvisation of music. She also mentors early-career engineers and leaders navigating growth in high-performance environments.

Nisarga Markandaiah is an engineering manager at Spotify, where she leads a distributed team spanning Europe and North America. Her team operates at the intersection of content understanding and advanced machine learning to enhance user experiences across the Spotify platform. Prior to her current role, she served as an engineering manager within the search organization at Etsy, following an eight-year tenure as a software engineer. Her professional background also includes a period at IBM, where she contributed to the Watson AI organization, developing enterprise machine learning solutions. In her leisure time, she engages in birdwatching at various New York City parks, explores the city’s buzzing food and art scene, and enjoys spending time with her family on weekends.

Travis Perkins is the VP of Customer Experience at Tailscale.

Leif is currently leading multiple teams as a Senior Engineering Manager at Semgrep, the company behind the eponymous open-source tool and Application Security platform. Previously, Leif was a manager at Twilio Segment where his team was focused on building customer-facing security features and internal security tools.

Leif has worked in the information security space for over a decade, has helped organize multiple conferences and meetups, and is currently the co-host of the podcast 404: Security Not Found.

Marilyn Cole has spent a quarter century in tech, and almost a decade in tech leadership. She’s currently an Engineering Manager at a Boston-based startup, Jellyfish, that’s reimagining how engineering leaders connect with the business and their teams.

Before Jellyfish, Marilyn spent time in engineering at Intuit, Google, Seller Labs, and Tuft & Needle. Marilyn’s interests include well-designed command line tools, beautiful and informative data visualizations, and tools to motivate people to learn, grow, and create. She also loves Tybee Island, her twin kiddos, vegan gummy candy, and Janet from The Good Place.

Pavel is a software engineer and engineering manager with over a decade of experience building infrastructure, automation, and applications at companies including Airtable, Apple, and The New York Times. He has alternated between individual contributor and leadership roles, giving him a well-rounded perspective on scaling products and teams. Outside of work, Pavel is an active angel investor, supporting early-stage founders in Nevada and beyond through several angel groups. He also enjoys creating side projects, having shipped mobile and web apps used by thousands of people.

Shawn is a distinguished technology executive with a proven track record of scaling businesses from startup to hypergrowth. He founded and led AWS Canada, building its business and data centers to enable Canadian enterprises to transition to the cloud. His career highlights also include leading enterprise adoption for Amazon Web Services in New York and serving as chief architect for the Royal Bank of Canada.

Returning to Ottawa, he established the AWS Solutions Global AI Hub and ran engineering for multiple businesses at Shopify. Currently, as the Canadian Country Manager for Pythian, Shawn helps businesses leverage data, AI, and cloud services for transformational growth. He is a recognized community leader, recognized for his contributions to both business and non-profits.

Kavitha Govindarajulu is a Principal Software Engineer at Microsoft. As a hands-on technology leader, she has led full-stack teams of varying sizes, delivering innovative software solutions with a focus on cloud-native SaaS product engineering. She seamlessly transitions between management and individual contributor roles. Kavitha is passionate about diversity and inclusion, empowering women in tech through various initiatives.

Aaron Silverman is a Staff Engineering Manager at Datadog, following its recent acquisition of Eppo. He leads the feature flagging team, which helps top software companies around the world safely deploy, test, and learn from features. Prior to Datadog and Eppo, he scaled engineering teams from three to forty engineers and contributed to successful outcomes at multiple growth-stage startups, including three exits. With deep experience in automation, data tooling, and developer productivity, Aaron brings a pragmatic approach to building high-performing teams. He is also an active advisor to rural startups in Colorado, where he lives with his family and occasionally runs mountain trails.

With 30 years working in software, Martin has done a lot of things. Over that time working to deliver software at scale, to multiple platforms, with multiple technologies. He is now working with Harness, the modern software delivery platform to enable organizations and teams to deliver their software faster, more reliably, and more securely.

Jon is a Principle Engineer at Squarespace in New York City, where supports the Squarespace Scheduling product. Previously he led product engineering teams at Blink Health and Knewton, and cofounded Arrive. Jon likes public transit, rock concerts, and NYC’s beaches.

Allison McHenry is the CTO at Daily Kos. She has been a technical people leader at companies such as The Daily Beast, Meta, and The New York Times over the last ten years.

Stacey Watro is a versatile software engineer with a passion for building teams, test-driven development, and paired programming. She is an experienced Spring Boot and Gradle practitioner, enthusiastic about leveraging open-source solutions to solve complex problems.

James is a senior staff engineer, currently on sabbatical, who has been building high-performance teams for over a decade. As both a manager and a technical leader, he has led the adoption of practices like CI/CD, feature flagging, inner source, shifting quality and security left while shifting human testing right. James works to align teams that can move autonomously and safely.

Fiona is the cofounder of Frank & Eddy Leadership. She is passionate about fostering authentic, self-aware, and collaborative leadership teams through coaching and facilitating. Prior to founding Frank & Eddy, she spent 7 years at Spotify supporting product and engineering leaders (Sr, Director, VP) to lead through fast-paced change, and building a high-performing senior leadership team in a large Platform Engineering organization (for a period, leading a cross-functional organization of 130 people).

Alia is the cofounder of Frank & Eddy Leadership and is passionate about building collaborative cross-functional product development teams. She is a coach and facilitator, and has been a founder and engineer. Prior to founding Frank & Eddy, she coached at Spotify during 7 years of explosive growth, where she supported product and engineering leaders (Sr, Director, VP) to lead through continual change.

Fabian Camargo is a leadership and management coach with a background in Software Engineering. He loves the craft of coaching and helping people achieve their goals while becoming their best selves. He has been coaching full-time since 2019. He has coached leaders from entry-level managers to SVP and every level in between. Prior to this, he had a 22 year career as a software engineer, making his way from entry-level engineer to Director.

He has a Certificate in Leadership Coaching for Organizational Well-Being from George Mason University, a B.S. and M.Eng. in Computer Science from Cornell University, and is an ICF-certified coach (PCC).

Reuben Ogbonna is the co-founder and executive director of The Marcy Lab School, a one-year, industry-co-designed alternative to college that prepares production-ready software engineers. Since 2019, Marcy Lab has supported nearly 300 Fellows, with graduates landing roles at companies such as Microsoft, Bloomberg, and Asana, spanning large enterprise, high-growth startups, and leading media/tech organizations. The fellowship blends rigorous technical training with leadership development and real product work, so graduates arrive with strong fundamentals, team habits, and practical AI literacy. On average, alumni start above $100,000. A Raleigh native with family roots in Imo State, Nigeria, and Shreveport, Louisiana, Reuben previously coached teachers across New York City as a director at Teach For America. Outside of work, he’s a devoted dad and an avid cook, happiest grilling on his Big Green Egg to Afrobeats and old-school R&B.

Alessandra Moreira is a Director of Quality Engineering at BrainPOP.

Angie Jones is the VP of Engineering, AI Tools & Enablement at Block, Inc.

An award-winning educator and international keynote speaker, Angie shares her extensive knowledge with software companies and conference audiences worldwide.

As a Master Inventor, Angie is recognized for her innovative, out-of-the-box thinking, which has led to 27 patented inventions in virtual worlds, collaboration software, social networking, smarter planet initiatives, and software development processes.

Addy Osmani is Head of Developer Experience working on Google Chrome. He leads up teams focused on making the web fast and low-friction to build on for developers. Addy has authored a number of books and has spoken at conferences around the world.

Joe Cardali is the Head of Engineering at Constrafor.

Lisa Ferrante-Walsh is the Senior Vice President of Engineering at Native Instruments, where she leads several talented engineering teams who support and develop market-leading and award-winning audio technology applications. As an experienced technology leader, Lisa has spent her career designing and building software solutions, managing and coaching people, and shipping high-quality and compelling products and services across industries such as Media, Energy, Healthcare, and Storage solutions.

Alexandra Batchelor is the Founder & CEO of Pebble.

Prianna is a Software Architect at Salesforce, where she collaborates across organizations to design scalable distributed infrastructure used to power SaaS applications. Previously, she worked on Oracle Kubernetes Engine for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Prianna is passionate about distributed systems, diversity, and the intersection of the two.

Mike Adler is a Principal Systems Architect at Etsy, where he works on architecture reviews, incident response, engineering culture and bot management. He likes working at Etsy because they let him announce the annual winner of Etsy’s Three Armed Sweater Award— an award which celebrates the engineer who uncovered the most surprising and spectacular system behavior. Mike has been on-call for a variety of high profile and unglamorous systems and has spent decades devoted the craft of reliability. He even has a lucite plaque that proves he invented a patented system to improve website availability.

Born in Mexico City, living in San Francisco for over a decade. Currently working at Fastly, where he enjoys collaborating with incredible co-workers making the Internet a fast, reliable, and secure place.

After 11 years as an engineering manager and leader at Airbnb, Jessica has switched to being a career coach. Most recently she managed the GraphQL unified data access layer product infra team. She has given talks around the world about Service-Oriented Architecture migrations and Managing Remote Engineering Teams. She holds a Masters in CS from Stanford and a Bachelors from UCLA.

Mihir Vora is a Senior Distinguished Engineer at Capital One with a passion for empowering teams and driving innovation. A firm believer in “leading without authority,” Mihir has successfully balanced technical contributions with strategic leadership. With over 15 years of experience in cloud engineering, DevOps, and full-stack development, he has been instrumental in transforming the banking at Capital One through technology. His expertise in optimizing developer experience and accelerating software delivery has led to significant improvements in productivity and efficiency. He enjoys complex problem-solving and passionate about mentoring and continuous learning. When not immersed in the world of technology, Mihir enjoys the outdoors, exploring National Parks with his family, and finding hiking and running therapeutic.

Fellipy Ferreira is an IT Engineer Lead at Santander Bank.

Anya is a seasoned engineering strategist dedicated to organizational effectiveness and outcome-minded leadership. They design programs that strengthen culture and align teams to shared goals. At Etsy, Anya has led major modernization projects on legacy customer-facing mobile apps, launched an initiative that streamlined hiring at scale in a new market, and pioneered an annual innovation event that shapes engineering roadmaps. They also coach engineers and managers, cultivating technical excellence, influence, and sustainable growth. As a Squad Advisory Board member for Lesbians Who Tech, Anya champions LGBTQ+ advancement through advocacy and community building.

Liz Hustedt fell in love with computers as soon as her hands could reach the keyboard. Her first foray into tech was a false-start, as she navigated discriminatory behavior during college. Switching majors, Liz graduated with her RN-BSN and worked as a Neuro ICU nurse for 5 years, before finally switching back into software development and fulfilling her long-time dream. She has worked in big corps, seed-stage start-ups, and mid-sized companies. Currently, she finds herself at Imagine Pediatrics as a Senior Engineering Manager.

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.

Krys Flores is a Staff Software Engineer at Crunchyroll on the Partner Engineering team. She has previously held Staff Software Engineer roles at Carta and Lob, and earlier in her career worked at Simple Habit and Nordstromrack.com | HauteLook.

A self-taught engineer, Krys found her path into tech through persistence and curiosity and has built a career she loves. She is passionate about empowering underrepresented communities through mentoring, sponsoring, and speaking. She also shares resources to support those transitioning into tech.

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.

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.

Shelly is an experienced engineering leader who is passionate about building a strong and supportive engineering culture that fosters diversity and growth. She is currently the Director of Engineering at CircleCI.

Jez Humble is co-author of several books on software: Jolt Award winner Continuous Delivery, Lean Enterprise, The DevOps Handbook, and Shingo Publication Award winner Accelerate. He has spent his career working on code, infrastructure, and product development in companies of varying sizes across three continents, from startups to the US Federal Government, and taught classes in software engineering and product development at UC Berkeley. He was co-founder and CTO of DORA (DevOps Research and Assessment), which was acquired by Google in 2018. He currently serves as the technical lead of the SRE team for Google Cloud’s Serverless products (Cloud Run and App Engine).

Engineering Manager and co-founder, are both titles Taylor Poindexter holds. She is an Engineering Manager at Spotify and cofounder of Black Code Collective — an organization that strives to create a safe space for Black engineers to grow their skills and network. In her spare time, she enjoys sharing her knowledge of whiskey with anyone that will listen.

Chris is the Engineering Manager at Lovevery, where he leads a team dedicated to helping toddlers and parents around the globe find joy and learning through play. His previous roles include leading frontend and backend teams to launch and enhance financial investing apps at Stash and deliver predictive machine learning tools for e-commerce at Black Crow AI.

A well-traveled nerd, Chris has pet a baby whale in Mexico, ridden inside a giant mechanical elephant in France, rafted to glow worms in New Zealand, and kicked a deflated kickball in an abandoned Soviet mining town in the Arctic Circle.

Dilip Krishna is a Managing Director and Global CTO for Sustainability, responsible for setting Deloitte’s technology vision as well as engineering and operating software solutions using the latest Gen AI, automation and cloud technology to serve clients with their sustainability initiatives. Dilip also leads Greenspace Tech, an AI-enabled climate-tech advisory that Deloitte uses to help clients execute climate strategies.

In these roles, he brings his 30 years of technology, analytics, consulting and industry experience to helping clients effectively apply new and disruptive technology to effect transformative business changes using AI/analytics/big data, cloud and cyber security. Prior to Deloitte, Dilip served as a partner at Teradata Corporation where he oversaw the Professional Services practice in financial services, working closely with large banking clients to implement
some of its largest analytics systems. He has worked with government agencies in regulation and transparency, including being called upon to offer expert testimony to the Financial Services Subcommittee of the US House of Representatives.

In addition, Dilip has been widely published and quoted in the areas of sustainability technology, AI and automation. He is a senior editor and contributing author of the Handbook of Financial Data and Risk Information (Cambridge University Press).

Kelly Vaughn is an engineering leader, entrepreneur, and side project aficionado. She is currently a Senior Engineering Manager at Zapier and is passionate about coaching individual contributors into leadership roles and mentoring engineering managers to be impactful, empowering leaders. When she’s not working, you’ll probably find her running, traveling to a new country, or spending time at a coffee shop to make a tiny dent in her never-ending book collection.

Liz Hustedt fell in love with computers as soon as her hands could reach the keyboard. Her first foray into tech was a false-start, as she navigated discriminatory behavior during college. Switching majors, Liz graduated with her RN-BSN and worked as a Neuro ICU nurse for 5 years, before finally switching back into software development and fulfilling her long-time dream. She has worked in big corps, seed-stage start-ups, and mid-sized companies. Currently, she finds herself at Imagine Pediatrics as a Senior Engineering Manager.

Angel Hsu is most recently a Senior Engineering Leader leading AI, ML and Compute Infrastructure at Stripe, where she leads a team developing and optimizing ML models and scalable infrastructure to support ML-based real-time fraud detection and related horizontal initiatives across Stripe. Prior to Stripe, Angel has led and worked on computation-based initiatives across financial payments companies. Angel holds a Master of Science (S.M.) degree in Computational Information Engineering and Data Sciences from Harvard University and two Bachelors of Science (B.S.) degrees from the University of California, Berkeley.

Chris is the head of developer experience, working across Augment to make building software better for every developer. Chris has been making developers happier and more productive for 15 years at innovative companies like New Relic, GitHub, Salesforce, and FireHydrant.

Over 15+ years driving software development initiatives, with a strong track record of leading, planning, and delivering technology solutions for both customer-facing and internal applications across the financial and entertainment sectors.

Shawn is a distinguished technology executive with a proven track record of scaling businesses from startup to hypergrowth. He founded and led AWS Canada, building its business and data centers to enable Canadian enterprises to transition to the cloud. His career highlights also include leading enterprise adoption for Amazon Web Services in New York and serving as chief architect for the Royal Bank of Canada.

Returning to Ottawa, he established the AWS Solutions Global AI Hub and ran engineering for multiple businesses at Shopify. Currently, as the Canadian Country Manager for Pythian, Shawn helps businesses leverage data, AI, and cloud services for transformational growth. He is a recognized community leader, recognized for his contributions to both business and non-profits.

Daniel Lees is a technology leader and Cloud Security Architect at Google, holding advanced CISSP-ISSAP and ISSMP certifications. He has extensive experience building secure, web-enabled systems across multi-cloud infrastructures , applying “design by security” and “design for failure” principles. An evangelist for immutable infrastructure and automation , Daniel maintains a sharp focus on auditability, control, and compliance. His background includes roles as a Principal Architect at both Google and HSBC.

Beth Crane is a Staff Software Engineer at Flatiron Health, where she works to make clinical trials more scalable and accessible. Prior to Flatiron, Beth worked on the Microsoft HoloLens, where she built novel interaction mechanisms for AR/VR.

Beth enjoys refactoring legacy codebases and building engineering cultures where people are thoughtful developer citizens. When she’s not optimizing systems or mentoring teammates, you can find Beth taking photographs, riding an ebike around NYC, or adding functionality to her website’s esheep.exe replica.

Beth believes that most problems (no matter how technical they seem on the surface) can be solved by making a new friend.

James is a senior staff engineer, currently on sabbatical, who has been building high-performance teams for over a decade. As both a manager and a technical leader, he has led the adoption of practices like CI/CD, feature flagging, inner source, shifting quality and security left while shifting human testing right. James works to align teams that can move autonomously and safely.

Alia is the cofounder of Frank & Eddy Leadership and is passionate about building collaborative cross-functional product development teams. She is a coach and facilitator, and has been a founder and engineer. Prior to founding Frank & Eddy, she coached at Spotify during 7 years of explosive growth, where she supported product and engineering leaders (Sr, Director, VP) to lead through continual change.

Fiona is the cofounder of Frank & Eddy Leadership. She is passionate about fostering authentic, self-aware, and collaborative leadership teams through coaching and facilitating. Prior to founding Frank & Eddy, she spent 7 years at Spotify supporting product and engineering leaders (Sr, Director, VP) to lead through fast-paced change, and building a high-performing senior leadership team in a large Platform Engineering organization (for a period, leading a cross-functional organization of 130 people).

Engineering leader with 15+ years of experience in CPaaS and SaaS. Expert in real-time voice and video communication. Director of Product and Engineering at Infobip, leading innovation on the Voice and Video platform.

Philip Lee is a Principal Engineer at ev.energy – making the world’s electric car charging simpler, greener, and cheaper. He spends his time thinking about how to become a better senior IC – hello LeadDev! – as well as indulging in too many hobbies.

Esther Kundin is a senior software engineer with 18 years of experience. She currently works as a Software Engineering Manager at Google, making backend development easy and safe.

Previously, she has worked at Amazon AWS on the EMR product and at Bloomberg as the lead architect and data engineer for the Machine Learning in News department.

She holds a BA in Computer Science and Mathematics from New York University and a Masters in Computer Science from Columbia University. When she is not working, Esther enjoys spending time with her husband and 4 daughters, especially when it involves building robots.

Vaishnavi Mukundhan is a Software Engineering Manager at Indeed.

Marilyn Cole has spent a quarter century in tech, and almost a decade in tech leadership. She’s currently an Engineering Manager at a Boston-based startup, Jellyfish, that’s reimagining how engineering leaders connect with the business and their teams.

Before Jellyfish, Marilyn spent time in engineering at Intuit, Google, Seller Labs, and Tuft & Needle. Marilyn’s interests include well-designed command line tools, beautiful and informative data visualizations, and tools to motivate people to learn, grow, and create. She also loves Tybee Island, her twin kiddos, vegan gummy candy, and Janet from The Good Place.

Akshay Shah is a Field CTO at Antithesis.

Hahnara is a Compute Specialist Solution Architect at AWS, based in NYC where she focuses on helping customers optimize performance and cost of their compute infrastructure. Previously, she developed gamified AWS enablement platform, to drive engaging technical workshops because learning should be fun. Outside of work, she enjoys hosting whodunit parties and game nights.

Starting from a non-traditional background Vlad has had an extensive Software Engineering career across different roles, industries and continents, including at several FAANG companies. Currently focused on Site Reliability Engineering at Google, he’s passionate about building scalable and reliable solutions that bring real value. In his spare time Vlad enjoys reading and watching sci-fi, handcraft and cooking.

Fiona is the cofounder of Frank & Eddy Leadership. She is passionate about fostering authentic, self-aware, and collaborative leadership teams through coaching and facilitating. Prior to founding Frank & Eddy, she spent 7 years at Spotify supporting product and engineering leaders (Sr, Director, VP) to lead through fast-paced change, and building a high-performing senior leadership team in a large Platform Engineering organization (for a period, leading a cross-functional organization of 130 people).

Alia is the cofounder of Frank & Eddy Leadership and is passionate about building collaborative cross-functional product development teams. She is a coach and facilitator, and has been a founder and engineer. Prior to founding Frank & Eddy, she coached at Spotify during 7 years of explosive growth, where she supported product and engineering leaders (Sr, Director, VP) to lead through continual change.

David’s long and varied career in engineering and design has been driven by two desires since the start: “what we build should be beautiful, and must be pleasant for humans to use.” Currently in Productivity Engineering at Netflix, he spends his working hours making his fellow engineers’ labor less laborious.

Lesley Cordero is currently a Staff Engineer at The New York Times. She has spent the majority of her career on edtech teams as an engineer, including Google for Education and edtech startups.

She is primarily focused on platform engineering and reliability management, particularly in the observability space. Her leadership style focuses on cultivating a culture that builds with the most vulnerable employees in mind first, and she shows care for others by holding them accountable to the best versions of themselves – and by buying them the occasional bubble tea.

Esther Kundin is a senior software engineer with 18 years of experience. She currently works as a Software Engineering Manager at Google, making backend development easy and safe.

Previously, she has worked at Amazon AWS on the EMR product and at Bloomberg as the lead architect and data engineer for the Machine Learning in News department.

She holds a BA in Computer Science and Mathematics from New York University and a Masters in Computer Science from Columbia University. When she is not working, Esther enjoys spending time with her husband and 4 daughters, especially when it involves building robots.

Jimil is an engineering leader with extensive experience working at a variety of tech companies (both D2C and B2B) of different sizes. He is most passionate about finding creative ways to help people and teams succeed (and grow himself while at it) using his core competencies – collaboration, autonomy, empathy and curiosity.

On the personal side of things, Jimil lives in Raleigh, North Carolina (although he was born and raised in India) with his wife and their 5 year old daughter. He enjoys reading books (non-fiction/philosophy in particular), watching movies and playing/watching cricket in his free time.

Mica Alaniz is a Chicagoan, first and foremost, born and raised. She is also a Technical Leader focused on a values-based team growth, advocacy and coalition-building. All of which she brings to her role as a Senior Engineering Manager on the Admin & Trust team at Slack.

Prior to that, she spent two US election cycles – the 2018 Midterm and 2020 Presidential elections – on the Tech team as an Engineer, Tech Lead and then as one of the first Engineering Managers at the Democratic National Committee. There she built tools to support Democratic candidates and campaigns power data-driven organizing and voter education. She is also proud to have been an organizing leader in the drive to form the DNC Staff Union.

She continues to be engaged in her community through giving talks, teaching workshops and offering coaching centered around underindexed individuals in tech. In her spare time, she can be found enjoying and exploring her hometown, inhaling books, collecting board games and having this thing with coffee where she needs it to live.

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.

Mary Parsons is an Engineering Manager at Defense Unicorns, focused on accelerating software deployment for the DoD. The curiosity that led her to start her career as a chemist also drove her to engineering leadership, where she has over 10 years of leadership experience across government, corporate, and startup cultures. She loves people, all things STEM, and great food, and is happiest when fostering communities of innovators, creators, and problem solvers.

Dan is the Engineering Lead for Development Lifecycle at Asana where he focuses on dev productivity and CI/CD tooling. With over 15 years of software experience, he is passionate about the craft of engineering management and enabling teams to do their best ork. Dan lives in Brooklyn, and when he Dan isn’t thinking about building teams or building systems, you can find him running in Prospect Park or running after his two kids with his wife.

Gargee Anjikar is an engineering manager in educational software, leading a team focused on school roster data systems. She has expertise in cloud services, data migration, and complex service rewrites, including large-scale database transitions. Passionate about applying AI and AI agents to improve efficiency and data consistency, she combines technical leadership with a focus on team growth, productivity, and building scalable solutions.