
StaffPlus New York video hub
All the videos from our New York events
StaffPlus New York 2025 videos
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“Us vs. Them” thinking
Why us vs. them thinking arises, how to spot it, and how – and why – to bridge the divide.
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Scaling AI for high-stakes, real-time payments
What does it take to run real-time AI in Stripe’s core payment flow? This is the story of scaling ML in a latency-critical system used by billions and built by multiple engineering orgs.

Deadline: January 4, 2026
Call for Proposals for London 2026 is open!
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Coherent impact: The art of strategy
Explore how to turn short-term chaos into long-term impact through practical strategies for resilient, grounded engineering leadership.
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Scaling systems, scaling influence: Lessons from distributed architecture
Scaling systems and scaling influence share the same principles. Learn how distributed systems thinking can help you become a more effective technical leader at scale.
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In partnership with FastlyThe silent infrastructure crisis: AI bots and the future of web performance
A technical deep dive into AI bot traffic’s infrastructure, security, and performance impacts, backed by Fastly’s large-scale 2025 analysis.
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Anti-Misalignment: Nobody knows what “alignment” is
Most “alignment” efforts just react to misalignment. This talk reframes alignment as group flow, explores why misalignment is so viscerally felt, and shares practical tools to move from reactive coordination to proactive clarity and autonomy.
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You can big bang!
Explore when rewriting code from scratch actually works and how to plan a successful, high-impact system redesign.
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Leading a team through 0-1 product development
In this talk, we will discuss tips for leading an engineering team through developing a new product fast, especially when there are a lot of unknowns.
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In partnership with AntithesisBuild bravely: Delivering risky projects
Learn how clear specifications and property-based testing help engineers take bolder roadmap risks, ship faster, and collaborate safely with LLMs.
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Lessons from the other side: What your VP is actually thinking
Learn how to build a partnership with your VP by sharing unfiltered reality and gaining the context you need.
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The altitude slider: Knowing when to dive into code vs. drive the strategy
Practical cues and rituals that help senior ICs oscillate between architectural vision and hands-on execution.
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Are we arguing or are we architecting?
Guiding technology decisions at scale is daunting for senior ICs. Spirited debates often feel like conflict, but they’re crucial. Learn to turn these clashes into collaborative, well-informed decisions. Are we arguing or architecting?
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Engineering excellence: New product development in medical devices
Lessons from leading a seven-year development of a NextGen SPECT/CT scanner, focusing on innovation, compliance, and team leadership.
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Reimagining the image pipeline at Squarespace
This talk explores the evolution of Squarespace’s image pipeline—why change was needed, how the architecture adapted for scale and flexibility, and the unique challenges faced along the way.
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Un-becoming the bottleneck
The biggest obstacle to team growth is often Staff+ engineers themselves. Breaking this pattern requires more than just “org-wide impact” it calls for deep, deliberate focus on growing 2-3 key engineers around you.
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Building Figma Draw
Explore how a small, scrappy team at Figma turned a big product vision into a major launch through smart execution.
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In partnership with UnblockedAI won’t fix developer productivity (unless you fix context first)
Discover how context engineering unlocks real developer productivity, making AI tools effective by connecting decisions, history, and code.
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AI-accelerated migrations at scale
Learn how Airbnb has been using AI and self-serve tools to enable seamless, large-scale migrations, and some of the hurdles we’ve faced to get there.
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The magic of crisis
Discover how Staff+ engineers can use moments of crisis to drive lasting technical change and strengthen organizational systems.
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Scaling LinkedIn’s search infrastructure: Key decisions and engineering challenges
Explore the key engineering decisions and challenges behind scaling LinkedIn’s search infrastructure to support billions of daily queries.
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Compiler makeover: How technical debt created happier developers
Tired of endless patches and quick fixes to your developer tools? So were we. Learn how we at WSO2 turned our outdated Ballerina compiler into a driver of innovation, community growth, and happier developers.
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How to lead when you just don’t know the tech
How to lead successfully in unfamiliar technical domains by embracing uncertainty, empowering teams, and still delivering results – even when you’re not the expert.
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The lean architect: Experimenting your way to better decisions
Discover how hypothesis-driven architecture helps Staff+ engineers make better decisions early, reduce risk, and build resilient systems.
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Requirements [Citation needed]
A reflective talk on questioning “requirements,” exposing assumptions, and reducing costly missteps through honesty, clarity, and adaptability.
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Guiding mentees on the path to distinguished engineering
Discover how to mentor engineers toward Distinguished roles by developing technical excellence, strategic impact, and organizational influence.
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All of this has happened before
A mother-daughter conversation revealing how past tech trends mirror today’s AI hype and what we can learn.

Videos from previous years of StaffPlus New York
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Nail the pitch and stick the landing: How to propose & deliver major technical projects
Learn how to pitch refactor projects effectively. Ei-Nyung shares successful strategies from leading a major infrastructure re-architecture, cutting development time by 65%.
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Slack enterprise key management: Senior to staff lessons
Explore the key lessons and skills Audrei gained during their first Staff+ project, Slack Enterprise Key Management. This talk offers insights for anyone growing in their Staff+ career.
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Sometimes you need to be a cruise director
Some problems staff engineers face aren’t about technical expertise, but clarity and decision-making.
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Should we multi-cloud?
Is multi-cloud right for your organization? In this session, Tanu shares a decision-making framework and real examples to help you navigate this complex question.
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The OSS maintainer to staff engineer pipeline
Discover how lessons from open source software maintenance shape effective staff engineers. This talk explores key insights on scaling, influence, and collaboration learned from OSS projects.
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Doing the right thing vs doing things right
Explore how successful companies navigate the tension between correct engineering choices and unexpected user needs. This talk shares lessons from a surprising product release journey.
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With great power comes great responsibility
Learn how today’s systems impact billions of lives and why engineers must prioritize failure safety. This talk explores driving this crucial shift in software engineering.
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Start with an exit in mind: How to be effective by being selfish as a staff engineer
Staff engineers often get overwhelmed by long-term ownership of critical projects. This talk explores how to avoid burnout by starting every project with an exit strategy—whether transferring ownership, pausing or bootstrapping a team.
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Explosive overflow: Lessons from rocket science
Thirty-nine seconds after launch, the Ariane 5 rocket exploded—caused by software design errors. In this talk, Mark analyzes these historical flaws to explore key lessons in resilience and product security. We’ll discuss testing, validation, legacy code, design assumptions, and the challenge of proving when things don’t go wrong.
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Navigators: Connecting execs with StaffPlus engineers to shape strategy
As organizations grow, it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain alignment among individual contributors (ICs), managers, and executives.
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Finding opportunities and maximizing Impact: A staff engineer’s framework
This talk introduces the Listen-Act-Share framework, guiding you to find, evaluate, and scale high-impact projects. Using real examples, like transforming Datadog’s analytics infrastructure, you’ll learn to spot valuable opportunities, invest your time wisely, and iterate after validation. Discover what sets great opportunities apart and how to apply this framework for maximum impact.
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Focus on project value using businesses strategy
Staff+ Engineers often fear working on the wrong projects. This talk explains how that fear stems from misalignment with your company’s business strategy. Learn to identify your company’s strategy, align your projects with it, and communicate value to stakeholders. Maximize your impact by refocusing efforts on work that truly matters.
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Using clinical science to effectively tackle code review anxiety (StaffPlus)
Code review anxiety is often dismissed as a “junior developer issue,” but this talk challenges that misconception with scientific research. Carol Lee shares findings from studies on the causes and effects of code review anxiety, revealing cognitive factors like self-efficacy and bias that worsen it. You’ll also learn about an empirically tested intervention to help developers manage anxiety and create healthier code review cultures.
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Software security as a force of nature
In this keynote talk, Kelly explores principles, practices, and patterns that are actually effective at sustaining systems resilience, from the overlooked to the counterintuitive.
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Psychologically safe reliability management
Lesley explores the challenges of driving observability platform adoption in a multi-product organization, using a case study focused on production readiness for a General Election.
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Simplify streaming application development: A declarative approach at Airbnb
This talk discusses the growing importance of streaming applications in today’s tech landscape and the engineering challenges involved, such as handling multiple data sources and complex transformations.
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The (big) picture of debt
What is the true cost of a choice to e.g. share a database, and what does it take to change it? When is the right time to tackle something like this, and how can we tell? Tali shares experiences with these questions that will set you up for success with your own enormous debt payment.
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Starting from nothing
In this talk, Lawrence shares lessons learned from experiences bootstrapping teams. He’ll draw from experience at GoCardless as a Principal Engineer when leading efforts to build a new Open-Banking payment scheme, and more recently as the engineer who helped go from zero-to-release of the incident.io Status Pages and Catalog products.
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Being a force for cultural change in your organization
Your responsibility to work toward this change also increases dramatically with your privilege. Nicole talks through some concrete ways to magnify the change you effect in your work while doing things you already do anyway.
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Leading your team through a major refactor – don’t be a hero, be a leader
In this talk Dylan shares his experience leading a team through uncharted waters and the lessons learned along the way.
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Substrate engineering: Engineering foundations in a world of LLMs
We need to start investing much more in migrating to better programming languages, building better tooling, and authoring new frameworks where correctness is built in. What does that look like for your engineering organization today?
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Beyond generic goodstuff: Helping teams navigate context
In the dynamic landscape of software engineering, there’s a pervasive allure to what Randall calls “Generic Goodstuff™” – universally lauded practices that seem like silver bullets to team improvement.
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Creating technical leadership in context
This talk will cover how Joy and Nathan overcame challenges at Plaid through the creation of a technical leadership structure parallel to management.
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Self-defense for change agents
In this session Amy will talk about her experiences as a change agent and what she learned about how to do it sustainably, even when the change ahead is drastic.







