Agenda
June 27-28We reviewed hundreds of CFP applications and hand-picked the best talks to help you grow as a technical engineering leader.
WELCOME
Registration and refreshments
Welcome to StaffPlus London 2023
Welcome to StaffPlus London 2023
A welcome to StaffPlus London 2023 from the host Tanya Reilly.
Featuring:
Filling the jar of impact and trust as a Principal Engineer
In this talk Nayana will be sharing some tips and tricks to identify rocks, pebbles and sand you can fill your jar with, ways they enable you to create impact and build trust across the organization and some common challenges you will face when you prioritize your work using this technique and ways to overcome those.
Filling the jar of impact and trust as a Principal Engineer
Principal Engineer in most organizations is the most senior, technical, individual contributor role you can hold. You get involved in supporting product teams, drive tech initiatives across clusters, act as a glue across different teams and clusters and are part of leadership teams. This gives an opportunity to have a very wide impact on the organization.
That said, your role is to influence without exerting authority. This means people across the organizations from junior engineers in a team to Engineering Directors, VP of Engineering and CTO will need to trust you to actually have an impact.
An analogy I picked up in my early days of being a principal engineer that I have often followed is the one about how if you put sand in a jar first, you do not have room for rocks, where rocks represent life’s big priorities and sand the little things, whereas if you put the rocks in first you’ll still have room for some sand. (Here is a link to a version which includes beer).
In this talk I will be sharing some tips and tricks to identify rocks, pebbles and sand you can fill your jar with, ways they enable you to create impact and build trust across the organization and some common challenges you will face when you prioritize your work using this technique and ways to overcome those.
.png)
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 LeadDev articles and talksFeaturing:
.png)
The Journey of a Byline
In this talk we will explore the journey our content takes through the many, many applications in our microservices architecture.
The Journey of a Byline
How does our journalism get from the nimble fingers of our journalists to the nimble minds of our readers? The answer is computers.
In this talk we will explore the journey our content takes through the many, many applications in our microservices architecture. I'll cover aspects of the system that are not ideal, and how we're working to fix it. Join me as I struggle to draw a compelling technical architecture diagram in Keynote and test the limits of the acceptable use of the FT digital colour scheme.

Alice Bartlett is a Principal Engineer at the Financial Times. She lives with her family by the sea.
View Alice's LeadDev articles and talksFeaturing:

Running large scale migrations continuously
This talk will go over strategies and principles to make large scale migrations less daunting, both from a technical and organisational point of view.
Running large scale migrations continuously
Staff Engineers and Tech Leads often get tasked with planning and executing migrations.
These projects usually take significant time and energy to get off the ground and delivered to success. This talk will go over strategies and principles to make large scale migrations less daunting, both from a technical and organisational point of view. We'll dive deep through examples discussing effective technological principles, convincing stakeholders, motivating teams and embracing both success and failure.

Suhail is a Senior Staff 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 LeadDev articles and talksFeaturing:

BREAK
Refreshments
Enjoy some refreshments during the break
Scaling your influence when you can only be in one place at once
This talk will cover a case study of the problem "how do we ensure all our teams are meeting code quality standards", looking at approaches that are likely to (and have!) failed, vs. those which are much more likely to lead to results and long-lasting buy-in.
Scaling your influence when you can only be in one place at once
When your scope as a Staff-Plus engineer moves beyond your immediate team, it becomes increasingly important to ensure that you're able to scale your thinking without giving yourself an impossible job of being involved in every technical decision.
One way to achieve this is using tooling, but how can you implement this effectively without alienating people once it's introduced?
This talk will cover a case study of the problem "how do we ensure all our teams are meeting code quality standards", looking at approaches that are likely to (and have!) failed, vs. those which are much more likely to lead to results and long-lasting buy-in.
.png)
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 LeadDev articles and talksFeaturing:
.png)
Scaling Your Influence through Documentation
In this talk I'm reflecting on my 2 year journey as a Staff Engineer, and how a mix of documentation and working groups has been a surprisingly effective strategy for influencing the opinions of the individual engineers as well as the non-technical stakeholders.
Scaling Your Influence through Documentation
Without writing lines of code, how do you - as an Individual Contributor - become someone who influences the opinions of multiple cohorts of people at once?
How can you communicate with your exec sponsors, peers and junior engineers and ensure that your vision for the future is reaching your audiences, without spending your days trying to get face-to-face time with each of them?
Once you've had your "big idea that you need to convey to everyone" it's daunting think of the time and effort that would be required from you to meet everyone face-to-face and then repeatedly (and reliably) convey this idea to the in order to reach a common understanding. It's also high stakes - there's lot riding on your personal brand and it's likely to be intimidating and on both sides. Documentation is the way forward. Not technical documentation per se, but artefacts such as guidelines, best practices, decision trees and even full-on white papers.
As an individual your reach might be limited to when and where you are present, but as an author of content you’re able to change hearts and minds while you sleep and reach your audience with your message in a format that endures, at a time and pace that is convenient for them.
In this talk I'm reflecting on my 2 year journey as a Staff Engineer, and how a mix of documentation and working groups has been a surprisingly effective strategy for influencing the opinions of the individual engineers as well as the non-technical stakeholders. We'll talk about the principles I use to determine 'good' and 'useful' documentation, some key guardrails to keep your content approachable, and the risks of falling to the dark side - using documentation as 'proof of work' or creating the dreaded wall of text.

James is a Staff Engineer at Compare the Market. Back in school he said he wanted to do "something with art and computers" and that's translated into a career making websites, and ensuring that they look pretty, are usable and accessible. As a Staff Engineer he works to ensure that the output of multiple teams is of the highest quality and efficiency.
View James 's LeadDev articles and talksFeaturing:

Solving the puzzle of staff+ time management
In this talk, we will start by looking at: How the expectations of your role imply changes in how you manage your time, strategies to avoid feeling like you are being stretched in multiple directions, understanding how you work best, and identifying which strategies apply to you.
Solving the puzzle of staff+ time management
As software engineers, we are used to working within the bounded context of our team. This can make our day to day easy to manage. Our work is drawn out of a project management tool and the meetings we have are limited to agile ceremonies. Right?
Step into a staff plus role, where you find yourself working across teams or departments and leading initiatives that span much longer than the typical agile sprint. You have ambitious goals, but how do you adapt to this change? How do you take ownership of your time? How do you make sure you are spending the time on what you need to?
In this talk, we will start by looking at: How the expectations of your role imply changes in how you manage your time, strategies to avoid feeling like you are being stretched in multiple directions, understanding how you work best, and identifying which strategies apply to you.

Blanca Garcia Gil is an independent data consultant. For the last 8 years she has worked across the data stack, most recently setting up the analytics platform at fintech startup topi. She honed her skills diving into scaling issues within the BBC’s Data Platform team as principal engineer. In her free time, she loves travelling, reading, swimming, and cooking. She enjoys learning new hobbies such as clothes making, drawing or languages. She grew up in Spain and has also lived in the United States and Australia. She currently lives in London, UK.
View Blanca's LeadDev articles and talksFeaturing:

Defining Expectations of Staff Engineers
This presentation is mainly targeted for Staff Engineers who work on defining their own roles and responsibilities. Writing a Staff Engineer Guide, and agreeing on the expectations between the engineering and the management, is a great way to learn about your organization.
Defining Expectations of Staff Engineers
Agreeing on anything in a large group has always been tricky. It requires quite a bit of patience, thick skin and persistence in staying focused on the subject.
Now, imagine agreeing on your own responsibilities, expectations and things you look after with the whole company. Together with a group of friends we took the challenge and defined the first "Staff Engineer Guide" at MongoDB. And wow, it was quite the trip.
During today's presentation, I will take you on a journey and tell you about all the adventures we've gone through writing this document. I will share the books and blogs we read, and the videos we watched while preparing the materials. I will highlight what discussions were crucial in the process, and finally, we will enter unexplored territory of new Staff Engineer Archetypes.
This presentation is mainly targeted for Staff Engineers who work on defining their own roles and responsibilities. Writing a Staff Engineer Guide, and agreeing on the expectations between the engineering and the management, is a great way to learn about your organization. Senior Engineers could also learn from it. Aligning with the explicit expectations from Staff Engineer roles is a great practical pointer to be promoted.

Sebastian Łaskawiec is an enthusiastic Staff Software Engineer who focuses on Kubernetes, Operators and data workloads. Part of his free time, Sebastian dedicates for helping others to unlock their potential by co-organizing Bydgoszcz Java User Group as well as the BitConf conference in Bydgoszcz. Privately, a husband and a father who spends most of his free time with kids playing sports or hitchhiking.
View Sebastian 's LeadDev articles and talksFeaturing:

BREAK
Lunch
We'll take a break for lunch
Maximizing your impact when context-switching
I've spent the last few years trialing a few different ways to sustainably maximize this time by balancing productivity with a bit of mindfulness. Come learn from my (many) mistakes, and hopefully we can all feel a bit less like a Dalí painting.
Maximizing your impact when context-switching
We all have those mornings/days/weeks where we find ourselves context switching frequently: answering a message here, triaging an issue there, jumping into yet another Slack huddle.
If you're anything like me, by the end of the day, you wonder where the time went (and if you got anything done at all). As engineering leaders, as our scope of influence grows, we're more likely to get pulled into ever-increasing directions, our calendars becoming neat little stacks of commitments. We can trim unnecessary meetings and block out dedicated focus time, but we can't outright eliminate periods of high-context switching. So, how do we make the most of these whirlwind blocks of time?
I've spent the last few years trialing a few different ways to sustainably maximize this time by balancing productivity with a bit of mindfulness. Come learn from my (many) mistakes, and hopefully we can all feel a bit less like a Dalí painting.

Maude is a Senior Staff Engineer at Slack where she is a founder and technical lead for the backend performance infrastructure team. She's responsible for large-scale load test tooling, performance regression monitoring, and successfully onboarding the world's largest companies to Slack. Over the past six years, she's helped the product scale from just 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 LeadDev articles and talksFeaturing:

Homebrew’s Great Migration: Moving to GitHub Packages with Zero Downtime
In this talk, I’ll discuss the following: the key factors we evaluated to decide between the options available, how compromises were made within and between Homebrew and GitHub (my employer), what techniques we used to implement the migration by the hard deadline with zero downtime, and how to use “soft power” to affect change in your organisation without “hard power” to decide what any individual works on.
Homebrew’s Great Migration: Moving to GitHub Packages with Zero Downtime
Homebrew (the open source software package manager) had a problem.
We had a hard, three-month deadline to migrate all our package hosting from Bintray (which was shutting down) to something else. We had several options, no full-time engineers and no explicit agreement on how we should move forward.
In this talk, I’ll discuss the following:
- the key factors we evaluated to decide between the options available
- how compromises were made within and between Homebrew and GitHub (my employer)
- what techniques we used to implement the migration by the hard deadline with zero downtime
- how to use “soft power” to affect change in your organisation without “hard power” to decide what any individual works on
.png)
Mike McQuaid is the CTO and Cofounder of Raise.dev. Previously, he spent a decade at GitHub, improving the internal developer and open source maintainer experiences. Outside of work, he is the project leader of the Homebrew package manager (which he has maintained for 13 years), author of "Git in Practice" (an intermediate Git book) and writes and speaks about open source, engineering career development, remote work, and empathy in tech on his site, podcasts and conferences.
View Mike 's LeadDev articles and talksFeaturing:
.png)
Navigating Complex Projects: Finding the Right Mode of Operation
In this talk, I share my journey of deciding on an effective mode of operation when engaging with complex projects. Join me as I discuss the importance of balancing assertiveness and adaptability in your interactions in these projects.
Navigating Complex Projects: Finding the Right Mode of Operation
In this talk, I share my journey of deciding on an effective mode of operation when engaging with complex projects.
Join me as I discuss the importance of balancing assertiveness and adaptability in your interactions in these projects.

Mahmut has a proven track record in scaling SaaS platforms, building startups, and serving big retailers in the UK and US. Mahmut has experience in delivering software solutions for users across global markets in e-commerce, search, e-learning, finance, gaming and public cloud verticals. Currently a Principal Engineer at Microsoft, Mahmut is a respected mentor and leader, guiding teams to tackle complex technical challenges for the leading global companies and nonprofits.
View Mahmut's LeadDev articles and talksFeaturing:

Working on software that is older than you
In this talk, Sally will share her views on working on an older codebase. She will share her experience watching the codebase evolve from incorporating acquired startups, to consolidating code branches. She will share pain points that she found to be repeated after joining a younger company.
Working on software that is older than you
Agreeing on anything in a large group has always been tricky. It requires quite a bit of patience, thick skin and persistence in staying focused on the subject.
If you are working at a startup you are likely writing code from scratch, failing fast and breaking things, all while enjoying the ride. However, that is not always the case at other companies where you could be working with code that is older than you or your colleagues -- you can still enjoy the ride though.
In this talk, Sally will share her views on working on an older codebase. She will share her experience watching the codebase evolve from incorporating acquired startups to consolidating code branches. She will share pain points that she found to be repeated after joining a younger company.

Sally is a Principal Software Engineer at Splunk where she works on data ingestion for observability. Before Splunk, she spent almost a decade working on operating systems for data storage systems at NetApp. Sally obtained her PhD in Computer Science from Clemson University. She presented her work and research both nationally and internationally. When not working you will find her doing computer science outreach activities, reviewing for technical conferences, mentoring, and learning Spanish.
View Sally's LeadDev articles and talksFeaturing:

BREAK
Refreshments
Enjoy some refreshments during the break
Practical Systems Thinking for Software Engineers
In this talk, Laura will cover methods such as EAST-BL, System Dynamics, and the Energy Barrier perspective, with a specific focus on how these methods can be applied to the development and operation of distributed software systems.
Practical Systems Thinking for Software Engineers
Large software systems are invariably complex systems. Patterns of interactions between interdependent subsystems can surprise us - and usually not in good ways!
By their very nature, complex systems are very difficult to reason about. But there are structured methods that can help us to understand our systems better, to design more robust software, and to learn more when things do go wrong.
In this talk, Laura will cover methods such as EAST-BL, System Dynamics, and the Energy Barrier perspective, with a specific focus on how these methods can be applied to the development and operation of distributed software systems.

Laura Nolan is an engineer and tech lead at Slack, working primarily on ingress loadbalancing and service networking. Formerly a Site Reliability Engineer at Google, Laura contributed to the 'Site Reliability Engineering' book published by O'Reilly, as well as 'Seeking SRE' and '97 Things Every SRE Should Know', in addition to writing for USENIX :login; magazine and Slack's engineering blog. Laura lives in Dublin, Ireland, and is the employee of two large and demanding cats.
View Laura's LeadDev articles and talksFeaturing:

How to level up as an engineer while doing what you love
In this talk, Blanca will share how a large organisation like UBS has created a three level levelling up strategy for Engineers technical career progression.
How to level up as an engineer while doing what you love
In this talk, Blanca will share how a large organisation like UBS has created a three level levelling up strategy for Engineers technical career progression.
She will also share how she focused her career towards being a Distinguished Engineer by combining continuous learning, solving tricky problems at large scale and engaging the engineering culture of the organisation.

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 LeadDev articles and talksFeaturing:

Unmasking Imposters by Debugging Doubts
In this talk, BobbyD takes inspiration from the popular game "Among Us" to address the challenges engineers face in understanding their value and the importance of developing team awareness to support one another, and shares practical strategies for embracing individual strengths, fostering team collaboration, and building bridges through empathy and inclusivity.
Unmasking Imposters by Debugging Doubts
Empowering Super Engineers at Scale
In this captivating and insightful talk, BobbyD a seasoned engineer and motivational speaker takes inspiration from the popular game "Among Us" to address the challenges engineers face in understanding their value and the importance of developing team awareness to support one another.
Shifting the focus from individuals overcoming imposter syndrome to the collective mindset of teams creating an inclusive and supportive environment, BobbyD shares practical strategies for embracing individual strengths, fostering team collaboration, and building bridges through empathy and inclusivity.

BobbyD is a seasoned Engineer → Motivational Speaker with 20+ years of experience in technology and engineering. Specializing in the practices of site reliability engineering (SRE) with an emphasis on hyper-scale distributed infrastructure. BobbyD is known for his outgoingness and historical knowledge of Twitter's Tech and D&I journey where he worked for 9-years becoming one of only a few Black engineers to achieve the title: Staff Engineer As BobbyD's journey continues, he looks forward for opportunities to contribute to his community #TheTechHustle by mentoring, coaching, and teaching the next generation about Tech and the value of “OUR” Diverse perspective.
View J. Bobby's LeadDev articles and talksFeaturing:


CLOSE
Wrap-up
Closing session
NETWORK
Networking mixer
Network with our community
END
Closing remarks
End of conference day
WELCOME
Registration and refreshments
Welcome to StaffPlus London 2023
Welcome to StaffPlus London 2023
A welcome to StaffPlus London 2023 from the host Tanya Reilly.
Delivering a Digital First BBC - An Architects Perspective
Realising big visions and missions is an exciting yet daunting task. Having worked at the intersection between Product, Delivery, Architecture and Engineering, this talk will explore what is key to continuously evolve the stack, the org, and ways of working.
Delivering a Digital First BBC - An Architects Perspective
Realising big visions and missions is an exciting yet daunting task.
Having worked at the intersection between Product, Delivery, Architecture and Engineering, this talk will explore what is key to continuously evolve the stack, the org, and ways of working.
.png)
Hannes Ricklefs is the Head of Architecture for Metadata, Audience and Publishing within the BBC’s Product Group - which delivers the future of digital products used by millions around the World. Before joining the BBC, Hannes worked for over a decade in feature film VFX, building platforms that enabled the global production of Oscar winning productions such as Disney’s Jungle Book. He has a strong interest in driving projects that have a positive impact on people and society.
View Hannes's LeadDev articles and talksFeaturing:
.png)
Defining a technical vision
In this talk, we will discuss the role of a technical vision in creating a roadmap for your organisation's technology evolution. We will cover how to assess your current technology architecture, defining your target state and identify next best steps for getting closer to your goal.
Defining a technical vision
As a technical lead, one of your responsibilities is to define a technical strategy and roadmap for your team, project or organisation, that will inspire your team members, and unlock value to allow your organisation to achieve its goals.
This is no easy feat, as you'll be working with various stakeholders with competing priorities for new features , modernisation and tackling technical debt.
In this talk, we will discuss the role of a technical vision in creating a roadmap for your organisation's technology evolution. We will cover how to assess your current technology architecture, defining your target state and identify next best steps for getting closer to your goal.
We will also delve into the process of aligning your technical vision with your product roadmap, ensuring that the technologies and platforms you invest in will support the development and growth of your product offerings. Through a combination of real-world examples and practical guidance, this talk will provide attendees with the tools they need to define a technical vision that drives modernisation and supports the long-term success of their organisation.

Eamon is a Staff Software Engineer at Bazaarvoice, leading a data platform team to design and build next-generation large-scale distributed systems. Aside from coding, Eamon is passionate about cooking, and spending as much time as possible with his Labrador.
View Eamon's LeadDev articles and talksFeaturing:

Putting down line management; returning to an individual contributor role
This talk should help you crystallise what options there are. It will clarify what actions can be taken to find out more. Whether you decide to ‘put down line management’ or not, you can make that decision in a more informed way and be more confident in your choices.
Putting down line management; returning to an individual contributor role
Line management was a useful and important part of my career progression. I found it rewarding and developed some valuable skills.
However, over time my role had become almost completely managerial. There was no space for me to get into the weeds of the code. I missed the code. I thought I may have missed the chance to be senior and immersed in the technical. I worried I couldn’t do it any more. It was by ‘good luck’ that I discovered the options I had. Perhaps I shouldn’t have left this up to luck!
I think the path I followed is not uncommon. It can be unclear how to make the transition back to a technical role (aka Individual Contributor, or IC). It’s hard to find out what options you have and what path is ‘best’ for you. Our career path is often led by the needs of the structure we’re working in. This is useful, but it's important to question at what point a change of path might be right.
This talk should help you crystallise what options there are. It will clarify what actions can be taken to find out more. Whether you decide to ‘put down line management’ or not, you can make that decision in a more informed way and be more confident in your choices.

Caroline recently became a Staff Software Engineer at Google (within Cloud SRE). Previously she worked at the Financial Times for 10 years. Whilst there she enjoyed being part of dramatic change from monolith to microservices. She loves making things useful, having great colleagues and cricket in the sunshine.
View Caroline's LeadDev articles and talksFeaturing:

BREAK
Refreshments
Enjoy some refreshments during the break
Cloud infrastructure architecture for Nubank’s global expansion
Nubank is one of the world's largest digital financial services platforms, serving over 70 million customers across Brazil, Mexico and Colombia. Our products and systems weren’t built to be multi-country. Rapid growth and scaling challenges drove rethinking cloud infrastructure and building a technical strategy.
Cloud infrastructure architecture for Nubank’s global expansion
Nubank is one of the world's largest digital financial services platforms, serving over 70 million customers across Brazil, Mexico and Colombia.
Our products and systems weren’t built to be multi-country. Rapid growth and scaling challenges drove rethinking cloud infrastructure, building a technical strategy and vision for hundreds of engineers and dozens of different teams, leading change, getting projects funded, and finally enabling product launches in new countries.

Born and raised in Brazil, based in Berlin, Laís Oliveira is a marathonist, outdoor sports enthusiast and a Principal Engineer at Nubank. She holds a bachelor in Computer Science and a MBA in Software Engineering both graduated in São Paulo. Over the years she has built large scale systems for retail and financial industries, including building Nubank since early days from 12 thousand to 70 million customers. As a technical leader her areas of interest are Functional programming, Software architecture and Cloud Infrastructure.
View Laís's LeadDev articles and talksFeaturing:

Building a shared vision: Creating alignment across autonomous teams
This talk will explore how to overcome these challenges, get buy-in from engineers to promote cross-team collaboration and alignment, all while establishing and refining shared standards and working towards a shared vision.
Building a shared vision: Creating alignment across autonomous teams
Autonomy is crucial for empowering teams to take ownership of their work and operate efficiently.
However, this can also lead to silos, duplicated efforts and differing “standards”.
This talk will explore how to overcome these challenges, get buy-in from engineers to promote cross-team collaboration and alignment, all while establishing and refining shared standards and working towards a shared vision.

Maria Neumayer is a Principal Software Engineer currently working at Skyscanner. She’s been working as an engineer since 2010, with a focus on Android and a keen interest in bringing teams and platforms closer together. She's an Austrian living in London, previously worked at various small to medium sized companies including Deliveroo, Citymapper and Path.
View Maria's LeadDev articles and talksFeaturing:

Working sideways
In this talk, I wanted to touch upon this slightly less talked about aspect of the job as a technical IC leader, which is creating peer relationships and working with other Staff engineers in shaping an organization’s technical roadmap.
Working sideways
Engineers at the Staff level and above are often expected to mentor and coach engineers who are in their early career.
At the same time, they’re also expected to work with engineering and product leaders in building effective solutions for their customers.
In the past years, the industry has created some very good material about how to do both of these. In addition to working with early to mid career engineers, product managers, designers and other cross functional partners, the engineers at Staff level are also expected to work with other Staff engineers. Often, such working peer relationships span organizational boundaries.
In this talk, I wanted to touch upon this slightly less talked about aspect of the job as a technical IC leader, which is creating peer relationships and working with other Staff engineers in shaping an organization’s technical roadmap. I’ll be sharing two case studies from my current and previous jobs and go into the details of what strong peer relationships between Staff+ engineers could look like and how they helped influence the organization’s technical decisions.

Aish is an engineer who currently works on GitHub Codespaces. In the past he has worked in high growth companies like Slack, PagerDuty where worked in building resilient real time data pipelines. Prior to that he had spent time at HackerRank and Goldman Sachs.
View Aish's LeadDev articles and talksFeaturing:

The dark side of lessons learned
In this talk, we will look at lessons learned, not learned and forgotten from past “failures”. Although, interestingly, not everyone deem them as failures.
The dark side of lessons learned
Failures and mistakes are part of software development, yet, we often deny and hide them.
When we open them for others to see, however, they could help with making sound decisions for future software projects. In this talk, we will look at lessons learned, not learned and forgotten from past “failures”. Although, interestingly, not everyone deem them as failures.
Past lessons are scattered in different documentations or in people’s heads. To reap the benefits, we rely on someone who oversees many projects to jump in and share those lessons. We also broadcast to other teams when we are at a decision making point on our current project, to catch any useful lessons other teams have learned. It could also happen serendipitously when the right person is in the right place and the right time to share those lessons. Think of overheard water-cooler conversations! Those actions do not always work. To boost the power of lessons learned from past projects and from other teams, we need a tool. A lightweight tool that pools the wisdom from past lessons and makes them available for all teams in the organization. In this talk, I will also share a way to keep and refer to those lessons when we need them the most.

Dianing Yudono has over a decade of software engineering experience in different products, teams and cultures. She is currently at Shopify, a global company with a platform built for independent business owners to start and scale their businesses online, in-store, and everywhere in between.
View Dianing's LeadDev articles and talksFeaturing:

BREAK
Lunch
We'll take a break for lunch
How not to lose friends and alienate yourself: Learnings from a journey to Staff Engineer
In this talk, I’ll reflect on my journey to Staff Engineer and discuss some of the personal pitfalls and unexpected challenges I encountered while moving through roles and the personal skills and strategies I’ve developed to address them.
How not to lose friends and alienate yourself: Learnings from a journey to Staff Engineer
I’ll reflect on my journey to Staff Engineer and discuss some of the personal pitfalls and unexpected challenges I encountered
In this talk, I’ll reflect on my journey to Staff Engineer and discuss some of the personal pitfalls and unexpected challenges I encountered while moving through roles and the personal skills and strategies I’ve developed to address them.
Waheed is a product engineer from Dublin, Ireland. He returned to college to study computer science after a career as a chef. During his time in college he interned at Amazon Data Service for 9 months before joining Intercom after graduating. At Intercom he has worked across engineering over his 6 years there, from backend and operational to product teams.
View Waheed's LeadDev articles and talksFeaturing:
The Dark Side of Standardization
You should leave this talk better equipped to decide whether embarking on a standardization project is right for your stack or organization, and how to do it in a way that avoids common pitfalls along the way.
The Dark Side of Standardization
Standardization is often touted as a solution to the very real problems associated with developing and taking care of pets, where you'd really love to have cattle instead.
Incremental changes become cheaper, the cognitive load required to reason about system behavior is less, solving a problem for one more often means solving it for everyone; the list goes on. But not all is rosier, and while some problems go away, new ones are sure to replace them.
You should leave this talk better equipped to decide whether embarking on a standardization project is right for your stack or organization, and how to do it in a way that avoids common pitfalls along the way.

Samantha Schaevitz is a Sr. Staff Software Engineer in Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) in Zürich, Switzerland, where she keeps Google Workspace running. Originally from California, she enjoys thinking about how complex systems fail, and why airplanes do not. Her maximum latitudinal position is 67.853°.
View Samantha's LeadDev articles and talksFeaturing:

Librarian's Guide to Documentation
Learn how to leverage librarian skills to create and maintain internal documentation that works for you. Improve technical decision making by fostering a culture of documentation excellence and inspiring clear, effective written communication with a few simple practices.
Librarian's Guide to Documentation
Learn how to leverage librarian skills to create and maintain internal documentation that works for you.
Improve technical decision-making by fostering a culture of documentation excellence and inspiring clear, effective written communication with a few simple practices.

Kaitlyn Tierney loves learning new things and sharing them with others—everything from archery, to ceramics, to software engineering is fair game. After starting her career as a zoo librarian in San Diego, she's currently a Staff Software Engineer at Farewill, where she focuses on strengthening technical foundations, mentoring engineers, and writing everything down for posterity. She lives in London and works remotely.
View Kaitlyn's LeadDev articles and talksFeaturing:

Engineering transparency
In this talk, I explain why it’s valuable to show our work as Staff engineers. I offer concrete ways to behave transparently and give examples of how each has helped me and my colleagues.
Engineering transparency
Staff roles can be “odd shapes” when viewed from any particular angle: our leaders, our cross-functional peers, and other engineers will be aware of certain aspects of our work, but may be unaware of others.
This makes it difficult both to be a good influence – modeling behaviors and approaches for aspiring engineers – and to manage expectations around our roles.
In this talk, I explain why it’s valuable to show our work as Staff engineers. I offer concrete ways to behave transparently and give examples of how each has helped me and my colleagues.

Cian Synnott is a Senior Staff Engineer at Datadog. He has worked in developer-facing SaaS for about a decade, and spent the decade prior in SRE at Google.
View Cian 's LeadDev articles and talksFeaturing:

BREAK
Refreshments
Enjoy some refreshments during the break
Building a diverse and inclusive guild from the ground up
This is Liem’s story, a France-born developer with Asian heritage, finding his space in the London tech scene. You will hear about his journey, from being the first frontend engineer at Accurx, to building a diverse and inclusive guild of 20+ members in two years.
Building a diverse and inclusive guild from the ground up
Diversity is a buzzword. We all talk about it. The companies we work for are all trying to achieve diversity targets, and founders tell us they are trying to be more diverse by setting a goal to hire X% of minorities.
As staff+ engineers, can we really make a difference when it comes to increasing diversity? More importantly, is diversity the right target to aim for?
This is Liem’s story, a France-born developer with Asian heritage, finding his space in the London tech scene. You will hear about his journey, from being the first frontend engineer at Accurx, to building a diverse and inclusive guild of 20+ members in two years.
He will explain why focusing on diversity was not the right approach for his team. Liem will share with you his view on inclusion and how he changed the company’s hiring process to adapt to the needs of his team. He will walk through the guild structure, communication between members, team up-skilling, the psychological safety in the team, the group decision making, the impact on the daily jobs of all the developers, and the challenges from the wider organisation.
The evolution of Accurx’s frontend guild is a clear example of why investing in diversity and inclusion is a powerful step to make everyone feel safer and more comfortable. This is an achievable goal that we can all take on as leaders in the tech industry.

Liem is a France-born, UK-based Frontend developer working at Accurx to build accessible software for the NHS. His role sees him hop between multiple teams to develop processes, put out fires and support others in the engineering community. Since first arranging his legos by colour and size, he 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 LeadDev articles and talksFeaturing:

Maps to Medicines: One Map to an Atlas
In this talk, you'll hear how Recursion scientists perform CRISPR-Cas9 mediated knockout to understand the activity level of every gene in a specific disease model, which allows new discoveries to be made. These maps are specific to a cell-type.
Maps to Medicines: One Map to an Atlas
Recursion is building maps of biology and chemistry to understand how genes interact with one another and their role in disease.
Recursion scientists perform CRISPR-Cas9 mediated knockout to understand the activity level of every gene in a specific disease model, which allows new discoveries to be made. These maps are specific to a cell-type.
New experiments run on Recursion’s platform generate novel insights that have to be periodically incorporated into new versions of the map. Generating an updated map version was manual and involved running scripts on development machines that filtered and aggregated new experiment data, uploading it to the cache that housed the map. Due to the manual intervention, the maps were updated as and when engineers or data scientists carved out time resulting in scientists having no guarantees for when to expect updates to the map.
Embedding on a team that built and maintained these maps of biology, we approached this problem systematically. We worked with our experiment operations team to ensure new experiments added to the map were ready on a specific day/time of the week. Next, we built infrastructure as code to execute the map building processes on cloud compute instances that were triggered after the experiments were ready. Finally, we improved the reliability of the underlying API that transferred the data from the cloud instances into the cache that housed the map. Making these improvements iteratively, we ensured that our scientists have novel insights at a weekly cadence. Additionally, we repurposed this infrastructure to build multiple maps (different cell types) thus creating an atlas of biology for Recursion.

Shweta is a Principal Engineer at Recursion Pharmaceuticals, currently working on improving speed, reliability and processing of maps of biology. She is also works on securing and building out the high performance version of the application that enables these maps to be accessible to Recursion partners. Before Recursion, she spent 15 years as a Senior Software Engineer at Cleo, Pearson, LogRhythm and a handful of other companies focused on design, development of software systems. She is originally from India, but now lives and enjoys active lifestyle in Boulder, CO where she enjoys trail running, yoga, and hiking with friends and family.
View Shweta's LeadDev articles and talksFeaturing:

Setting goals as a staff+ engineer
In this talk, you’ll learn how to define your development journey as a staff+ engineer, figuring out what you should be working on, how to set your goals, and how to you define your backlog of work. You’ll also learn how to track your progress so you can keep growing as an engineering leader in the individual contributor track.
Setting goals as a staff+ engineer
You don’t need “manager” in your title to lead engineering teams.
More and more, companies are investing in senior individual contributor tracks to support engineers as they grow. But once you get that staff+ role, the way you work changes a lot:
* You are working across multiple teams, so your goals are not a team’s goals anymore. How do you know what they are?
* You’re not “on the ground” working day-to-day within a team. How do you keep track of what’s going on?
* Coding is just one of the ways you deliver value. What else should you be doing? Your role now is to gather context and evaluate opportunities to help shape what you and other teams should focus on.
In this talk, you’ll learn how to define your development journey as a staff+ engineer, figuring out what you should be working on, how to set your goals, and how to you define your backlog of work. You’ll also learn how to track your progress so you can keep growing as an engineering leader in the individual contributor track.

Sabrina moved to London from Brazil and since then has worked as an engineer and leader for a number of companies, most recently Intercom as a principal product engineer. She enjoys working in cross-functional teams developing useful and delightful products, while maintaining long-lived and healthy codebases. Sabrina has helped shape the product development process at a number of companies and is always looking for new and better ways to work together.
View Sabrina's LeadDev articles and talksFeaturing:


CLOSE
Wrap-up
Closing session
END
Closing remarks
End of conference day
