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Day 1 – October 15, 2025
Day 2 – October 16, 2025

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MAIN TRACK
08:00–09:30

Arrival & Coffee

09:30

Talk

Welcome to StaffPlus New York 2025

A welcome from the hosts.

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Talk

Welcome to StaffPlus New York 2025

This session is suitable for:

A welcome from the host, Tanya Reilly.

  • FEATURING
    Maude Lemaire
    Principal EngineerGitHub

    Maude is a Principal Engineer at GitHub. Most recently, she was a Senior Staff Engineer at Slack where she was founder and technical lead for the backend performance infrastructure team. She was responsible for large-scale load test tooling, performance regression monitoring, and successfully onboarding the world’s largest companies to Slack. For nearly 8 years, she 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 profile
  • Tanya Reilly
    Principal EngineerDatadog

    Tanya Reilly is a principal engineer at Datadog and the author of The Staff Engineer’s Path. Originally from Ireland, she spent a decade in New York and now lives in sunny New Mexico.

    View Tanya’s profile
09:45

Talk

Distinguished Engineer•Principal Engineer•Staff Engineer

How I learned to stop worrying and love distributed systems: 25 years of lessons learned

Explore practical methods for continuous delivery, solving common challenges to enable faster, more reliable software releases for your team.

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Talk

How I learned to stop worrying and love distributed systems: 25 years of lessons learned

This session is suitable for:

Distinguished Engineer•Principal Engineer•Staff Engineer

If I had only 30 minutes to distill what I’d learned over the years, this is the talk I’d give. Most of the lessons will be about teams (the real distributed systems). I can’t guarantee consistency, but I will strive to be both available and tolerant.

  • FEATURING
    Jez Humble
    Site Reliability EngineerGoogle

    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).

    View Jez’s profile
10:15

Talk

Distinguished Engineer•Principal Engineer•Staff Engineer

Overcoming “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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Talk

Overcoming “us vs. them” thinking

This session is suitable for:

Distinguished Engineer•Principal Engineer•Staff Engineer

Inspired by the book The Phoenix Project and by DevOps principles, we worked to close the gap between Development and Operations, to come together and collaborate for the good of the organization. We even invited security into the fold and embraced DevSecOps.

Granted, if you’re like me, you’re still shaking your fist at somebody on the regular. You know who I mean. But they deserve it. Look at how much they mess everything up! They’re the ones who need to wise up and change, right? Right? The divides we encounter might be between teams, between geographical locations, between IT and “the business,” and more.

Join this session for an examination of why “us vs. them” thinking arises and how we can spot it in action. You’ll gain tips for why and how to bridge the divide – and why the effort can be worthwhile, even if “they” seem unmoved and unmovable.

Key takeaways:

  • How to spot “us vs. them” thinking in action
  • Tips for how to bridge the divide
  • Why the effort is worthwhile
10:25

Talk

Distinguished Engineer•Principal Engineer•Staff Engineer

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.

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Talk

Scaling AI for high-stakes, real-time payments

This session is suitable for:

Distinguished Engineer•Principal Engineer•Staff Engineer

As a Principal Engineer in Stripe’s Payment Intelligence org, I’m responsible for scaling real-time AI systems that detect and prevent fraud—without adding latency to Stripe’s most critical code path, known as the “charge path”.

At the heart of Stripe’s infrastructure, the “charge path” is a shared Ruby monolith that processes almost every transaction across the platform. In 2024 alone, it handled over $1.4 trillion in volume. It’s one of the most latency-sensitive and business-critical systems at Stripe, actively maintained by several engineering orgs and touched by hundreds of developers. Making changes here requires precision, coordination, and a deep understanding of systemic constraints.

Our org had a strong roadmap of AI innovations to improve fraud prevention and authorization rates. But executing that vision meant working through legacy architectural decisions and Ruby’s lack of native concurrency—all without exceeding strict latency constraints. To move forward, I brought together tech leads and domain experts from across Stripe for a virtual onsite. We ran an event storming workshop to surface shared constraints, uncover tribal knowledge, and identify architectural leverage points for introducing safe and meaningful parallelism. I proposed a series of deep but targeted architectural improvements to unlock more ML execution within the charge path, minimizing the risk. I then collaborated across teams to build a multi-quarter roadmap that aligned efforts, minimized conflicts, avoided throwaway work, and accelerated the landing of impact.

This talk is about what it takes to deliver AI innovation inside a high-stakes, real-time system—navigating legacy architecture, aligning across teams, and scaling machine learning under strict performance constraints.

Key takeaways:

  • How to scale real-time AI in a latency-sensitive system
  • How to introduce parallelism in a legacy Ruby monolith
  • How to uncover system constraints through structured collaboration
  • How to align multiple teams around architectural change
  • FEATURING
    Prasad Wangikar
    Principal Software EngineerStripe

    Prasad Wangikar, Principal Engineer at Stripe, leads Payments Intelligence, applying AI/ML to detect fraud and improve conversion in real-time transactions. With over two decades of experience in fintech, including building high-frequency trading systems, he excels at creating resilient, high-scale architectures. At Affirm, he scaled the fraud detection system, drove vendor resiliency, and led platform modernization, saving millions. Prasad’s expertise spans AI/ML implementation, robust data pipeline design, and intelligent infrastructure development. His background in low-latency, high-throughput trading systems informs his approach to building pressure-resistant architectures. Through strong architectural thinking and hands-on leadership, Prasad consistently elevates organizational reliability and engineering standards.

    View Prasad’s profile
10:55–11:40

Morning Break

11:40

Talk

Distinguished Engineer•Principal Engineer•Staff Engineer

Marcy Lab’s 90-day lift-off playbook: Building high-impact, durable engineers

From classroom to commit: How a one-year, industry-co-designed fellowship equips engineers to ship in the AI era and the simple onboarding patterns partner teams use to turn early talent into durable performers.

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Talk

Marcy Lab’s 90-day lift-off playbook: Building high-impact, durable engineers

This session is suitable for:

Distinguished Engineer•Principal Engineer•Staff Engineer

From classroom to commit: How a one-year, industry-co-designed fellowship equips engineers to ship in the AI era and the simple onboarding patterns partner teams use to turn early talent into durable performers.
11:50

Talk

Distinguished Engineer•Principal Engineer•Staff Engineer

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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Talk

Coherent impact: The art of strategy

This session is suitable for:

Distinguished Engineer•Principal Engineer•Staff Engineer

A story of building long-term outcomes out of the chaos of daily reality.

Have you ever tried to build a house on quicksand? I can’t imagine it would work very well! The ground is so chaotic and the landscape itself isn’t reliable enough to be the foundation you need. It feels like you can’t even get started, let alone build something sturdy enough to last.

Honestly, trying to build an engineering strategy and an engineering organization in today’s environment feels just as chaotic. Things are churning faster and faster, and the days of clear strategy are long gone (if they ever existed in the first place). Quarterly planning? Long-term thinking? Some days they feel like relics of the past, so what’s a leader to do?

In this session, join Hazel as she walks through a journey of how she took a rapidly evolving environment, where only short term goals could survive, and turned that chaos into something that long term success could be built on top of.

Key takeaways

  • Strategies for making local decisions pay off in the long run.
  • Techniques to not get buried in the firefighting.
  • What worked, what didn’t, what would Hazel have done differently?
  • FEATURING
    Hazel Weakly
    FellowNivenly Foundation

    Hazel spends her days building out teams of humans as well as the systems and tooling to make life better for others. She’s worked at a variety of companies and knows that the hardest problems to solve are the social ones. Hazel currently serves as a Director of the Haskell Foundation, as a Fellow of the Nivenly Foundation, and is fondly known as the Infrastructure Witch of Hachyderm (a popular Mastodon instance).

    One of her favorite things is watching someone light up when they understand something for the first time, and a life goal of hers is to help as many people as possible experience that joy. She also loves shooting pool and going swing dancing, both as a leader and a follower.

    View Hazel’s profile
12:20

Talk

Distinguished Engineer•Principal Engineer•Staff Engineer

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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Talk

Scaling systems, scaling influence: Lessons from distributed architecture

This session is suitable for:

Distinguished Engineer•Principal Engineer•Staff Engineer

As a Staff+ engineer, your role isn’t just about scaling systems—it’s about scaling influence across the organization.

Interestingly, distributed systems principles offer a powerful mental model for leadership. This talk explores how fault tolerance, redundancy, service contracts, and eventual consistency apply to leading large-scale engineering efforts.

Learn how to design for autonomy without chaos, how to create decision-making guardrails without bottlenecks, and how to recover from failure—both technically and organizationally. Whether you’re shaping technical strategy, aligning teams, or driving long-term change, this talk provides actionable insights to amplify your technical impact.

Key takeaways:

  • Apply distributed systems principles to scale your technical influence.
  • Design decision-making frameworks that prevent bottlenecks in large organizations.
  • Use fault-tolerance strategies to navigate organizational misalignment.
  • Build technical strategies that are resilient to leadership and system failures.
  • FEATURING
    Mallika Rao
    Engineering ManagerNetflix

    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.

    View Mallika’s profile
12:40

Talk

Distinguished Engineer•Principal Engineer•Staff Engineer

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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Talk

Anti-Misalignment: Nobody knows what “alignment” is

This session is suitable for:

Distinguished Engineer•Principal Engineer•Staff Engineer

Alignment is one of the most used and least understood concepts in engineering leadership. We say it’s critical, we hold meetings to get it, and we celebrate it in performance reviews. But if we’re really aligned, why do we keep needing more “alignment” meetings?

After a year of obsessing over this concept, I’ve come to believe that most alignment work is actually just anti-misalignment: a reactive attempt to avoid conflict, surprises, or churn. It’s alignment by damage control.

In this talk, I’ll reframe alignment as a form of group flow, a state where everyone knows where we are, where we’re going, and how we’ll navigate tradeoffs along the way. I’ll share a simple model that explains why misalignment feels so painful (and so obvious), and why real alignment isn’t a meeting, it’s a shared sense of direction, context, and trust. We’ll look at the difference between alignment and agreement, explore some dangerously common anti-misalignment patterns, and walk through lightweight strategies you can use today to improve clarity and autonomy across your team.

Whether you’re a Staff+ IC, a manager, or a tech lead, this talk offers a vocabulary and lens for the invisible cultural friction that slows teams down and a more proactive way forward

Key takeaways:

  • “Alignment” is a rarely useful concept as it can mean everything and nothing all at the same time
  • Misalignment is one of the most painful and visceral forces in an organization
  • Most “”alignment”” work is actually driven by the fear of misalignment
  • What true proactive and productive alignment looks like
  • Strategies to tease out true alignment against the background of “Anti-misalignment”
13:10–14:40

Lunch

14:40

Talk

Distinguished Engineer•Principal Engineer•Staff Engineer

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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Talk

You can big bang!

This session is suitable for:

Distinguished Engineer•Principal Engineer•Staff Engineer

You may have heard that rewriting code from scratch is a Thing You Should Never Do. We’ll critically examine the origins of that proverb and its applicability to modern software development, as well as share some stories and common patterns from successful rewrites.

Software engineering is a complex and contextual domain. Given any question, there’s a good chance that the best answer is “it depends.” Despite this, we still elevate some prescriptions to the level of “common sense” or even dogma. One such idea is “never rewrite the code from scratch,” which traces back at least as far as the year 2000.

I’ve had this proverb recited to me more than a few times by my superiors and peers. Sometimes, avoiding a rewrite has been the right call. But other times, eyes open to the potential issues and strategies to avoid them, I’ve pushed for a new system. Those projects have been some of the most rewarding and impactful of my career.

I’ll discuss the origins of the “never rewrite” idea and why the original reasoning doesn’t always apply to us today. I’ll also present my framework for planning a rewrite and how to capitalize on a successful one. Finally, I’ll share some stories of my successful rewrites and how they improved our engineering teams.

Key takeaways

  • Why rewrites are sometimes (but not always) a terrible idea and how to tell the difference
  • How to approach redesigning a system from scratch, from pitching the idea through to successfully landing your new system
  • Examples of successful redesigns, their technical impact, and the effect they had on their engineering teams

  • FEATURING
    Travis Thieman
    Staff EngineerDatadog

    Travis is a Staff Engineer at Datadog. He got his start as a management consultant and then a data scientist before eventually realizing he like the programming bits more than the statistics bits and jumping over to engineering. He was previously at GameChanger where he helped build a real-time platform for youth sports.

    He is a lover of dogs, video games, and whoever is currently playing the New York Yankees.

    View profile
15:10

Talk

Distinguished Engineer•Principal Engineer•Staff Engineer

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. 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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Talk

Leading a team through 0-1 product development

This session is suitable for:

Distinguished Engineer•Principal Engineer•Staff Engineer

How do you build something magical, fast?

In creating a new feature, engineering leaders have a lot to balance. Designs could be constantly in flux. Sharp pivots could be made weekly. There could be pressure to cut corners to hit deadlines. Despite all of this, engineering leaders are still expected to deliver.

To ensure that the team is spending their time in the right places, it’s essential to understand different approaches to prioritizing work to minimize risk and maximize impact. Engineering leads must also allow for balance timelines and flexibility, enabling the product to change as new insights come in, without letting development drag on. Making decisions in a fast moving environment can be overwhelming – it’s easy to get analysis paralysis. That’s why knowing when a decision needs to be made, and having a framework for making that decision, is crucial.

Key takeaways:

  • How to know what aspects of a new system to build out first
  • How to make decisions, while dealing with a lot of unknowns and pivots
  • How to deal with changes in scope, especially when dealing with strict deadlines
15:20

Talk

Distinguished Engineer•Principal Engineer•Staff Engineer

Building braver: How to take bigger risks in your roadmap

Discover why engineering teams avoid bold bets and how leaders can build confidence to pursue transformative high impact projects.

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Talk

Building braver: How to take bigger risks in your roadmap

This session is suitable for:

Distinguished Engineer•Principal Engineer•Staff Engineer

Sponsored by

Antithesis LeadDev

Why don’t we undertake more high risk/high reward projects? And how can we build the confidence to do so? Learn how your team can tackle the ambitious projects that will make a real difference.

Why don’t we undertake more high risk/high reward projects? And how can we build the confidence to do so? Akshay Shah and Youhana Naseim have decades of engineering leadership experience between them, and led high performing engineering teams through complex, high-impact systems projects at companies like Stripe, Microsoft, Github, and Uber. They dissect how and why software engineering is often risk averse, and how we as engineers and engineering leads can change that. Learn how you can tackle the ambitious projects that will make a real difference.

Key takeaways

  • Understand the roots of risk aversion. Many engineering organizations default to safe, incremental work. Recognizing the cultural and structural reasons behind this can help leaders shift mindsets.
  • Build confidence through systems and trust. High-risk projects succeed when teams have strong foundations, especially psychological safety and leadership support that encourages experimentation.
  • Balance ambition with discipline. Big bets don’t mean reckless execution.
  • Drive impact through bold projects. The most transformative work often comes from ambitious roadmaps. By intentionally cultivating bravery, engineering leaders can push teams toward projects that truly move the needle.
15:30

Talk

Distinguished Engineer•Principal Engineer•Staff Engineer

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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Talk

Lessons from the other side: What your VP is actually thinking

This session is suitable for:

Distinguished Engineer•Principal Engineer•Staff Engineer

Who knows what engineering VPs are thinking? I sure did not, until I became one. (Some say I still do not.) The real problem is a two-way information gap: your VP is starved for ground-truth, and you are missing the “why” behind their opaque decisions. This talk is a frank little conversation on how to build a partnership that closes that gap, so you can understand the strategy you need to do your job, and they can get the unfiltered perspective they have lost.

Ever seen an off-the-wall decision by the senior leadership cabal and wondered what they were thinking? It turns out it is rarely a secret plan, it is a structural information gap. Your VP is often starved for the ground-truth that you have, and you are missing the strategic “why” behind their decisions. They end up guessing about what is really happening on their teams, and you end up guessing about what work actually matters.

As a former VP who started at Slack as a Senior Staff IC, I have had the dubious pleasure of living on both sides of this gap. I have felt the IC’s frustration with confusing directives, and I know the executive’s pressure to make big calls with incomplete information. This talk is my attempt to translate the view from the VP chair. (For the record, I did not actually get a new physical chair.)

I will share a practical playbook for bridging this gap by trading your ground-truth for their context. We will cover how to make your VP an ally and advocate for your work, while acknowledging that the best path forward is often one that neither of you saw at the start. You will, ideally, walk away with a clearer plan to help decide where the ship is going instead of just being told to row.

Key takeaways

  • Your ground-truth is your most valuable currency. The core of the partnership is a trade: your unfiltered view of reality for their strategic “why.” This is how you both stop guessing about what work actually matters.
  • Your senior leadership isn’t a cabal; they’re disconnected.* Whether they’re a new leader learning the ropes or a veteran who’s lost touch, they are making big calls with incomplete information. Your role is to be their bridge to the team’s reality. Also, their meetings with bigwigs aren’t fun and their travel isn’t cool. JFYI.
  • Context is the foundation of influence. Use the strategic “why” you gain from the partnership to move beyond brilliant execution. This is what allows you to propose better solutions, stop projects that don’t make sense, and help steer the ship instead of just being told to row.

*If you are an engineer with, say, Skull & Bones, they might be a cabal though.
16:00–16:45

Afternoon Break

16:45

Talk

Distinguished Engineer•Principal Engineer•Staff Engineer

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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Talk

The altitude slider: Knowing when to dive into code vs. drive the strategy

This session is suitable for:

Distinguished Engineer•Principal Engineer•Staff Engineer

Practical cues and rituals that help senior ICs oscillate between architectural vision and hands-on execution.

  • FEATURING
    Curtis Allen
    Principal Engineer Slack

    I’m a Principal Engineer at Slack, where I’ve worked on the initial team that built Workflow Builder. I’ve since worked on rebuilding the Slack Developer Platform from the ground up. Before Slack, I’ve worked in education, financial, and government sectors, typically specializing in infrastructure and automation.

    View Curtis’s profile
17:15

Talk

Distinguished Engineer•Principal Engineer•Staff Engineer

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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Talk

Are we arguing or are we architecting?

This session is suitable for:

Distinguished Engineer•Principal Engineer•Staff Engineer

An essential challenge for senior individual contributors (ICs) such as architects and staff+ engineers is guiding engineering teams towards well-informed technology decisions at scale. This can be a daunting task, often frustrating and at times feels impossible.

Software engineering is inherently creative, much like painting, where no two artists would create the same artwork. This creativity leads to strongly held opinions, often resulting in spirited debates that can feel like arguing and conflict rather than collaborative brainstorming. These debates, though difficult and uncomfortable, are extremely important and critical to our overall success.

This talk delves into the unique challenges faced by senior ICs who wield influence but lack direct authority, emphasizing the importance of presenting choices over solutions and engaging early in the decision-making process. We will explore techniques to make these debates more constructive, collaborative, less driven by ego and conflict, and more likely to result in decisive, well-informed decisions.

Key takeaways:

  • Harnessing Conflict for Progress: Embrace the chaos and recognize that conflict, when managed well, can drive innovation and better outcomes.
  • Effective Decision-Making: Learn how to present choices over solutions to foster collaboration and reduce conflict.
  • Early Engagement: Understand the importance of influencing decisions early to avoid entrenched solutions and defensiveness.
17:25

Talk

Distinguished Engineer•Principal Engineer•Staff Engineer

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.

Ask ChatGPT

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Talk

Engineering excellence: New product development in medical devices

This session is suitable for:

Distinguished Engineer•Principal Engineer•Staff Engineer

It covers the 5-7 year development journey of a NextGen SPECT/CT scanner at Siemens Healthineers, from concept to clinical trial, sharing insights gained while leading an engineering team through challenges in architecture, culture, and compliance.

In this talk, you’ll get hard-earned leadership lessons from a 7-year NPD journey of a new line of Nuclear Medicine/CT scanners—systems where failure isn’t an option and reliability is non-negotiable. From handling deep tech complexity to empowering engineers to own quality, speed, and motivation in one of the most regulated domains in tech. Drawing on a multi-year product journey in healthcare tech, this talk reveals simple but powerful techniques to lead with intent, foster autonomy, and get world-class results—without hero culture.

Key takeaways

  • Fostering a culture of collaboration, open communication, and equal partnership across distributed teams is essential for leveraging global strengths, maintaining engagement, and ensuring product quality through real-time testing.
  • Technical leadership in the medical device industry demands a strategic focus on long-term planning, maintainability, regulatory compliance, and resource management, balancing innovation with the significant upfront investment and extended product lifecycles.
  • A multi-level testing approach—combining simulators, automated testing, and real-world system validation—along with fostering a culture of collaboration between development and system test, ensures comprehensive defect detection and guarantees software reliability and quality.
  • Understanding regulatory guidelines early in the development process and testing critical requirements separately are essential for managing compliance efficiently, preventing delays, and overcoming the unique challenges of new product development in a highly regulated industry.
  • While the challenges of long development cycles and unexpected obstacles, like the COVID-19 pandemic during clinical trials, can create uncertainty, the ultimate satisfaction of seeing your work positively impact users’ lives offers invaluable lessons that shape future leadership and decision-making.
  • FEATURING
    Anshu Bhatt
    Software Engineering ManagerChamberlain Group

    Anshu Bhatt is a dynamic and results-driven Software Technical Leader with over 20 years of hands-on experience in software engineering, specializing in the development of complex, high-impact systems. She has a proven track record of successfully guiding next-generation medical device products, including leading engineering teams through the entire product lifecycle—from concept to FDA approval. With expertise in areas such as system architecture, full-stack development, and regulatory compliance, Anshu has consistently delivered innovative solutions in industries like medical devices, telecommunications, and network security.

    Currently serving as a Software Engineering Manager with the Chamberlain, Anshu is responsible for driving software development for MyQ’s commercial cloud application, to drive product innovation and team efficiency. She leads cross-functional teams, orchestrates microservices architectures, and delivers scalable solutions for perimeter access control, enhancing user experience and security for communities. Anshu was previously a Principal Engineer/Tech Lead at Beckman Coulter Diagnostics where she was responsible for driving software development for next-generation hematology analyzers and integrating an AI-based solutions to enhance product capabilities. Her experience also spans extensive work at Siemens Healthineers, where she led software architecture for a next-gen nuclear medicine scanner, successfully navigating complex system integrations and ensuring compliance with regulatory standards.

    Anshu’s leadership philosophy focuses on fostering high-performance teams by creating an intellectually stimulating environment and championing Agile and SAFe practices. Her passion for mentoring and driving innovation has enabled her to solve technical challenges in areas of hardware-software integration, scalability, and product usability. As a senior technical leader, Anshu’s commitment to continuous improvement and customer-centric solutions ensures that projects meet deadlines and exceed expectations.

    With expertise in C#, .NET, C++, Vue.js, Python, Kubernetes, Docker, and observability tools like OpenTelemetry, Anshu remains at the forefront of software development trends and tools. Her collaborative approach to working with distributed teams has contributed to successful product launches and seamless integration of complex technologies in highly regulated environments.

    View Anshu’s profile
17:55

Talk

End of day wrap-up

Closing thoughts from the hosts.

+ More

Talk

End of day wrap-up

This session is suitable for:

Closing thoughts from the host.

  • FEATURING
    Maude Lemaire
    Principal EngineerGitHub

    Maude is a Principal Engineer at GitHub. Most recently, she was a Senior Staff Engineer at Slack where she was founder and technical lead for the backend performance infrastructure team. She was responsible for large-scale load test tooling, performance regression monitoring, and successfully onboarding the world’s largest companies to Slack. For nearly 8 years, she 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 profile
  • Tanya Reilly
    Principal EngineerDatadog

    Tanya Reilly is a principal engineer at Datadog and the author of The Staff Engineer’s Path. Originally from Ireland, she spent a decade in New York and now lives in sunny New Mexico.

    View Tanya’s profile
18:05–19:30

Networking Mixer

INTERACTIVE SESSIONS
10:50
12:00

Office Hours

Meet the speakers

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

+ More

Office Hours

Meet the speakers

This session is suitable for:

Chat with the speakers face-to-face in a relaxed, conversational environment.
12:00

Community Representation Groups

Black leaders

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

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Community Representation Groups

Black leaders

This session is suitable for:

Connect with folks over shared experiences

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

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

  • FEATURING
    Quincy Iheme
    Senior Manager, Software Development and EngineeringComcast
    View Quincy’s profile
  • Marqueze Sawyers
    Senior Manager Software EngineeringAsurion
    View Marqueze’s profile
  • Boomie Odumade
    Senior Engineering LeaderTechBees

    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.

    View Boomie’s profile
12:00

Director+ Drop In

Director+ drop in

Meet other senior leaders and grow your peer network

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Director+ Drop In

Director+ drop in

This session is suitable for:

Meet other senior leaders and grow your peer network

  • FEATURING
    Melissa Young
    SVP, EngineeringVox Media

    Melissa Young is SVP of Engineering at Vox Media, where she leads a multidisciplinary engineering organization spanning publishing platforms, infrastructure, advertising technology, data, consumer revenue, and commerce. She has over 15 years of experience working and leading in media technology enterprises ranging from small private publishers to large media conglomerates. Melissa thrives at the intersection of technical strategy, operational optimization and organizational leadership and will forever champion empowering engineers and leaders to create and support high-trust, high-performing teams.

    View Melissa’s profile
  • Alex Hidalgo
    Field CTONobl9

    Alex Hidalgo is the Field CTO at Nobl9 and author of Implementing Service Level Objectives. During his career he has developed a deep love for sustainable operations, proper observability, and using SLO data to drive discussions and make decisions. Alex’s previous jobs have included IT support, network security, restaurant work, t-shirt design, and hosting game shows at bars. When not sharing his passion for technology with others, you can find him scuba diving or watching Premier League football. He lives in Brooklyn with his partner Jen and a rescue dog named Taco.

    View Alex’s profile
11:45
12:00

Table Talks

How do you know where to focus your attention as a staff+ leader?

Join facilitated conversations and dive into key issues facing engineering teams

+ More

Table Talks

How do you know where to focus your attention as a staff+ leader?

This session is suitable for:

Join facilitated conversations and dive into key issues facing engineering teams

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

  • FEATURING
    Curtis John
    Manager, Software Development and EngineeringComcast

    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.

    View Curtis’s profile
  • Jonathan Jin
    Staff Machine Learning EngineerHinge
    View Jonathan’s profile
  • Daisy Liu
    Staff Engineering ManagerGoogle
    View Daisy’s profile
12:00

Speed Coaching

Speed coaching

Watch or participate in free 1:1 coaching with Fiona Siseman

+ More

Speed Coaching

Speed coaching

This session is suitable for:

Watch or participate in free 1:1 coaching with Fiona Siseman.

  • FEATURING
    Fiona Siseman
    Co-founder, Coach & FacilitatorFrank & Eddy Leadership

    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).

    View Fiona’s profile
12:00

Solution Swap

My team is being asked to move faster, but we’re already going as fast as we can. What can I do?

Trade tactics for tackling everyday challenges.

+ More

Solution Swap

My team is being asked to move faster, but we’re already going as fast as we can. What can I do?

This session is suitable for:

Trade tactics for tackling everyday challenges

Sometimes it can feel like every problem has only one answer – but the truth is, in leadership there’s never a single solution. But when you’re in the thick of a problem, it can be hard to get the headspace to see other ways to tackle a challenge. 

In our solution swap sessions, attendees will get the chance to say how they’d tackle a common issue and compare their ideas with how other leaders would confront the same problem. Our coaches will give direct feedback about the possible consequences (both positive and negative) of the ideas – and will ask the key question – if you were to do this, and then this happened – what would you do next?

  • FEATURING
    Alia Rose Connor
    Co-founder, Coach & FacilitatorFrank & Eddy Leadership

    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.

    View Alia’s profile
12:30
12:00

Table Talks

How can you manage your workload with your parenthood duties, without burning out?

Join facilitated conversations and dive into key issues facing engineering teams

+ More

Table Talks

How can you manage your workload with your parenthood duties, without burning out?

This session is suitable for:

Join facilitated conversations and dive into key issues facing engineering teams

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

  • FEATURING
    Seth Wimberly
    Senior Software EngineerGoogle

    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.

    View Seth’s profile
12:00

Speed Coaching

Speed coaching

Watch or participate in free 1:1 coaching with Fiona Siseman

+ More

Speed Coaching

Speed coaching

This session is suitable for:

Watch or participate in free 1:1 coaching with Fiona Siseman.

  • FEATURING
    Fiona Siseman
    Co-founder, Coach & FacilitatorFrank & Eddy Leadership

    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).

    View Fiona’s profile
12:00

Solution Swap

My team needs to be given time to fix technical debt but my leadership team won’t listen. What can I do?

Trade tactics for tackling everyday challenges.

+ More

Solution Swap

My team needs to be given time to fix technical debt but my leadership team won’t listen. What can I do?

This session is suitable for:

Trade tactics for tackling everyday challenges

Sometimes it can feel like every problem has only one answer – but the truth is, in leadership there’s never a single solution. But when you’re in the thick of a problem, it can be hard to get the headspace to see other ways to tackle a challenge. 

In our solution swap sessions, attendees will get the chance to say how they’d tackle a common issue and compare their ideas with how other leaders would confront the same problem. Our coaches will give direct feedback about the possible consequences (both positive and negative) of the ideas – and will ask the key question – if you were to do this, and then this happened – what would you do next?

  • FEATURING
    Alia Rose Connor
    Co-founder, Coach & FacilitatorFrank & Eddy Leadership

    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.

    View Alia’s profile
13:15
12:00

Office Hours

Meet the speakers

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

+ More

Office Hours

Meet the speakers

This session is suitable for:

Chat with the speakers face-to-face in a relaxed, conversational environment.
12:00

Next Steps AMA

Tackling the role of Tech Lead

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

+ More

Next Steps AMA

Tackling the role of Tech Lead

This session is suitable for:

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

  • FEATURING
    Sam Richard
    Senior Developer Relations EngineerGoogle

    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.

    View Sam’s profile
  • Divya Chandrasekar
    Software Engineering Team LeaderBloomberg

    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.

    View Divya’s profile
  • Ayush Jain
    Tech LeadMicrosoft

    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.

    View Ayush’s profile
  • Sally Northmore
    Lead Software EngineerClimatebase

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

    View Sally’s profile
12:00

Community Representation Groups

Neurodivergent leaders

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

+ More

Community Representation Groups

Neurodivergent leaders

This session is suitable for:

Connect with folks over shared experiences

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

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

  • FEATURING
    Francisco Estevez
    Software Engineering ManagerVCS HR
    View Francisco’s profile
  • Fiona Siseman
    Co-founder, Coach & FacilitatorFrank & Eddy Leadership

    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).

    View Fiona’s profile
  • Alex Karp
    Software Engineering ManagerThumbtack

    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.

    View Alex’s profile
12:00

Industry Interest Groups

Meet leaders from the Banking and Financial Services domain

Join our relaxed sessions where you can meet peers working in similar domains to share ideas, collaborate on challenges and exchange solutions.

+ More

Industry Interest Groups

Meet leaders from the Banking and Financial Services domain

This session is suitable for:

Join our relaxed sessions where you can meet peers working in similar domains to share ideas, collaborate on challenges and exchange solutions.
12:00

Voltron Quest

Voltron Quest

Inspired by Lara Hogan’s Manager Voltron, meet other leaders to build your peer network at StaffPlus New York.

+ More

Voltron Quest

Voltron Quest

This session is suitable for:

Inspired by Lara Hogan’s Manager Voltron, meet other leaders to build your peer network at StaffPlus New York.
12:00

Next Steps AMA

Stepping into the role of Staff Engineer

Dedicated sessions on how to take the next step in your career for stepping into the role of a Staff Engineer

+ More

Next Steps AMA

Stepping into the role of Staff Engineer

This session is suitable for:

Dedicated sessions on how to take the next step in your career for stepping into the role of a Staff Engineer

  • FEATURING
    David Giesberg
    Senior Staff Site Reliability EngineerH-E-B

    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.

    View David’s profile
  • Veronika Pliusnina
    Staff SDETex-Peloton, ex-Block

    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.

    View Veronika’s profile
  • Ajay George Palakuzhy
    Staff Software EngineerCoinbase

    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.

    View Ajay George’s profile
  • Lesley Cordero
    Staff Software EngineerThe New York Times

    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.

    View Lesley’s profile
12:00

Community Representation Groups

Asian leaders

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

+ More

Community Representation Groups

Asian leaders

This session is suitable for:

Connect with folks over shared experiences

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

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

  • FEATURING
    Yan Wang
    Engineering ManagerBloomberg
    View Yan’s profile
  • Jenny Gu
    Software Engineering ManagerBloomberg
    View Jenny’s profile
  • Mallika Rao
    Engineering ManagerNetflix

    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.

    View Mallika’s profile
14:30
12:00

Speed Coaching

Speed coaching

Watch or participate in free 1:1 coaching with Fabian Camargo

+ More

Speed Coaching

Speed coaching

This session is suitable for:

Watch or participate in free 1:1 coaching with Fabian Camargo.

  • FEATURING
    Fabian Camargo
    Owner, Leadership & Management CoachCamargo Consulting LLC

    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).

    View Fabian’s profile
12:00

Table Talks

How to mentor effectively?

Join facilitated conversations and dive into key issues facing engineering teams

+ More

Table Talks

How to mentor effectively?

This session is suitable for:

Join facilitated conversations and dive into key issues facing engineering teams

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

  • FEATURING
    Marilyn Cole
    Engineering ManagerJellyfish

    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.

    View Marilyn’s profile
  • Pavel Ivanov
    Software EngineerAirtable

    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.

    View Pavel’s profile
  • Shawn Gandhi
    Director of EngineeringShopify

    Shawn has spent the last 25 years building low-latency highly available systems across the US and Canada. Early in his career, Shawn lived in NYC building ultra-low-latency single dealer platforms for Wall Street’s biggest banks, hedge funds, and exchanges. 

    He then moved to AWS helping build the world’s largest cloud computing platform, and designing planetary-scale systems for the likes of Comcast, New York Times, and the Weather Channel.

    After moving back home to Canada and launching the first Canadian AWS Region, Shawn joined the Royal Bank of Canada as the Chief Digital Architect where he married AI with day-to-day retail banking. Building on this, Shawn rejoined AWS as the Head of AI Solutions before joining Shopify.

    View Shawn’s profile
12:00

Solution Swap

What the hell is a Principal Software Engineer anyway?

Trade tactics for tackling everyday challenges.

+ More

Solution Swap

What the hell is a Principal Software Engineer anyway?

This session is suitable for:

Trade tactics for tackling everyday challenges

Sometimes it can feel like every problem has only one answer – but the truth is, in leadership there’s never a single solution. But when you’re in the thick of a problem, it can be hard to get the headspace to see other ways to tackle a challenge. 

In our solution swap sessions, attendees will get the chance to say how they’d tackle a common issue and compare their ideas with how other leaders would confront the same problem. Our coaches will give direct feedback about the possible consequences (both positive and negative) of the ideas – and will ask the key question – if you were to do this, and then this happened – what would you do next?

  • FEATURING
    Alia Rose Connor
    Co-founder, Coach & FacilitatorFrank & Eddy Leadership

    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.

    View Alia’s profile
12:00

Speed Coaching

Speed coaching

Watch or participate in free 1:1 coaching with Fabian Camargo

+ More

Speed Coaching

Speed coaching

This session is suitable for:

Watch or participate in free 1:1 coaching with Fabian Camargo.

  • FEATURING
    Fabian Camargo
    Owner, Leadership & Management CoachCamargo Consulting LLC

    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).

    View Fabian’s profile
12:00

Table Talks

How do you influence decisions effectively as a staff+ leader?

Join facilitated conversations and dive into key issues facing engineering teams

+ More

Table Talks

How do you influence decisions effectively as a staff+ leader?

This session is suitable for:

Join facilitated conversations and dive into key issues facing engineering teams

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

  • FEATURING
    Goutham Bandapati
    Sr. Cloud and AI ArchitectMicrosoft
    View Goutham’s profile
  • Stacey Watro
    Staff Software EngineerSquarespace

    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.

    View Stacey’s profile
  • James Socol
    Senior Staff Engineer

    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.

     

    View James ‘s profile
16:00
12:00

Office Hours

Meet the speakers

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

+ More

Office Hours

Meet the speakers

This session is suitable for:

Chat with the speakers face-to-face in a relaxed, conversational environment.
12:00

Industry Interest Groups

Meet leaders from the Healthcare domain

Join our relaxed sessions where you can meet peers working in similar domains to share ideas, collaborate on challenges and exchange solutions.

+ More

Industry Interest Groups

Meet leaders from the Healthcare domain

This session is suitable for:

Join our relaxed sessions where you can meet peers working in similar domains to share ideas, collaborate on challenges and exchange solutions.
12:00

Next Steps AMA

Preparing for the role of Principal Engineer

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

+ More

Next Steps AMA

Preparing for the role of Principal Engineer

This session is suitable for:

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

  • FEATURING
    Prianna Ahsan
    Software Engineering ArchitectSalesforce

    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.

    View Prianna’s profile
  • Mike Adler
    Principal Systems ArchitectEtsy

    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.

    View Mike’s profile
  • Luis Flores Martinez
    Principal EngineerFastly

    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.

    View Luis Flores’s profile
  • Mihir Vora
    Senior Distinguished EngineerCapital One

    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.

    View Mihir ‘s profile
12:00

Community Representation Groups

Queer leaders

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

+ More

Community Representation Groups

Queer leaders

This session is suitable for:

Connect with folks over shared experiences

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

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

  • FEATURING
    Fellipy Ferreira
    IT Engineer LeadSantander Bank
    View Fellipy’s profile
  • Anya Glowa-Kollisch
    Senior Engineering ManagerEtsy

    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.

    View Anya’s profile
  • Liz Hustedt
    Senior Engineering ManagerImagine Pediatrics

    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.

    View Liz’s profile
18:05

Office Hours

Meet the speakers

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

+ More

Office Hours

Meet the speakers

This session is suitable for:

Chat with the speakers face-to-face in a relaxed, conversational environment.
WORKSHOP TRACK
MAIN TRACK
08:00–09:20

Arrival & Coffee

09:20

Talk

Welcome to StaffPlus New York 2025

A welcome from the hosts.

+ More

Talk

Welcome to StaffPlus New York 2025

This session is suitable for:

A welcome from the host, Tanya Reilly.

  • FEATURING
    Maude Lemaire
    Principal EngineerGitHub

    Maude is a Principal Engineer at GitHub. Most recently, she was a Senior Staff Engineer at Slack where she was founder and technical lead for the backend performance infrastructure team. She was responsible for large-scale load test tooling, performance regression monitoring, and successfully onboarding the world’s largest companies to Slack. For nearly 8 years, she 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 profile
  • Tanya Reilly
    Principal EngineerDatadog

    Tanya Reilly is a principal engineer at Datadog and the author of The Staff Engineer’s Path. Originally from Ireland, she spent a decade in New York and now lives in sunny New Mexico.

    View Tanya’s profile
10:00

Talk

Distinguished Engineer•Principal Engineer•Staff Engineer

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.

+ More

Talk

Un-becoming the bottleneck

This session is suitable for:

Distinguished Engineer•Principal Engineer•Staff Engineer

“It’s me– Hi. I’m the problem, it’s me,” croons Taylor Swift on her iconic track, “Anti-hero.” When it comes to the growth of those around us, this also applies to Staff+ Engineers.

Simply put, experienced ICs are often the largest barrier to growth of those around them. Leadership will turn to you when something mission critical has to get done fast. Leadership will turn to you to save someone else’s project that has run off the rails. Playing the hero feels really good in the short run. But it’s not sustainable in the long-run for you, or for the organization. Even if you don’t burn out, you slow or stunt the growth of others.

Think about when you grew most as an engineer. Some people will say, “it was when this really experienced person took me under their wing.” But most will say something like, “it was when that really experienced member of the team left, and I had no other choice but to step up.” By default, others grow more in our absence than in our presence. And, we struggle with this problem quite a bit. Our median tenure is quite high, which means the most common growth opportunity in the industry (“a senior IC leaves”) happens less often than elsewhere. This pushes us to experiment with different ways to grow others.

In this talk, I reflect on the ways I’ve tried (and often failed) to cultivate other engineers. Conventional wisdom says we should “scale” ourselves by focusing on “org wide impact”. But I’ve discovered the power of doing what doesn’t scale. When I’ve carved out time each week to invest in the three most capable engineers around me, something remarkable happens: the whole team sings.

Key takeaways:

  • By default, others grow more in your absence than in your presence.
  • Identifying and investing in 2-3 key people is super impactful
  • Push your best people regularly out of their comfort zone
10:10

Talk

Distinguished Engineer•Principal Engineer•Staff Engineer

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.

+ More

Talk

Guiding mentees on the path to distinguished engineering

This session is suitable for:

Distinguished Engineer•Principal Engineer•Staff Engineer

Learn how to effectively mentor aspiring technical leaders, focusing on cultivating the unique blend of technical mastery, broad impact, and organizational influence required for a Distinguished Engineer role.

Becoming a Distinguished Engineer is generally not an inline promotion. It is a position in which most companies ask you to apply. As the requirements are numerous and cover technical and non-technical areas, you need to develop a plan and support structure to prepare for this journey.

Most engineers can clearly articulate their technical capabilities. That’s the easy part. The more difficult areas include understanding the challenges and opportunities for the Business your Enterprise is engaged in. How do you develop and use your soft skills to influence senior management on roadmaps and directions for exploration.

In this talk, you’ll hear about the career development paths that will help you achieve your goals for becoming a Distinguished Engineer.

Key takeaways

  • The general requirements for Distinguished Engineer
  • The type of support will you need on this journey
  • The career development areas that you’ll need to develop
  • FEATURING
    Todd Outten
    Distinguished EngineerComcast

    Todd is a Distinguished Engineer in Comcast Cybersecurity, where he focuses on micro-segmentation networks, software architecture, micro services, and public cloud. His primary role is to help product teams adopt patterns and technologies that allow them operate efficiently, reliably and securely at scale. His specific expertise spans several key areas including: AWS, Kubernetes, event driven architectures, serverless, elasticity, network connectivity & policy enforcement, and content security.

    Prior to Comcast, Todd had over twenty years experience as a technology architect, CTO, and entrepreneur in the media & entertainment industry at organizations like Industrial Light & Magic (Lucasfilm), Sony Pictures Entertainment and Silicon Graphics.

    He also founded several venture capital backed technology companies in mobile, media & technology, direct marketing, and gamification.

    View Todd’s profile
10:40–11:20

Morning Break

11:20

Talk

Distinguished Engineer•Principal Engineer•Staff Engineer

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.

+ More

Talk

Scaling LinkedIn’s search infrastructure: Key decisions and engineering challenges

This session is suitable for:

Distinguished Engineer•Principal Engineer•Staff Engineer

This talk explores the engineering challenges and key decisions involved in scaling LinkedIn’s search infrastructure, focusing on architecture, scalability, and resilience at massive scale.

In this talk, I’ll walk through the journey of scaling LinkedIn’s search infrastructure, highlighting the key engineering decisions and challenges faced along the way. As one of the largest and most complex search systems in the world, LinkedIn’s infrastructure supports millions of users and billions of queries each day – while maintaining low latency, high availability, and scalability.

I’ll cover the technical decisions made in designing and evolving the system, including tool selection, framework choices, and architectural patterns that enabled LinkedIn to scale its search capabilities in response to growing data and user demands. From designing distributed systems to optimizing indexing, query handling, and storage, I’ll share the trade-offs involved in ensuring reliability and performance at scale.

Beyond the technical aspects, I’ll also discuss the organizational and team dynamics that come with scaling such a large system. This includes aligning cross-functional teams, coordinating across engineering groups, and making decisions that balance immediate execution with long-term vision for the platform.

Key takeaways

  • Key engineering decisions and challenges when scaling large-scale search infrastructure.
  • Best practices for designing and optimizing distributed search systems.
  • How to balance performance, scalability, and reliability in high-demand platforms.
  • Strategies for aligning cross-functional teams in large-scale infrastructure projects.
  • Lessons learned from building and evolving search systems to support millions of users.
  • FEATURING
    Rahul Raja
    Staff Software EngineerLinkedin

    Rahul is a Staff Engineer at LinkedIn, where he focuses on search and deployment systems at scale. Rahul is a graduate from Carnegie Mellon University and has a strong background in building reliable, high-performance infrastructure. He has led many initiatives to improve search relevance and streamline ML deployment workflows.

    View Rahul’s profile
12:20

Talk

Distinguished Engineer•Principal Engineer•Staff Engineer

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.

+ More

Talk

AI-accelerated migrations at scale

This session is suitable for:

Distinguished Engineer•Principal Engineer•Staff Engineer

Migrations need to be fast and seamless. But at scale, they’re often anything but – especially when many teams are involved and coordination overhead balloons. What if you could make migrations self-serve, so they just happen, without endless follow-ups or hand-holding?

At Airbnb, we’ve been working AI into our migration toolkit to rethink migrations from the ground up, guided by two tenets: “Complete to 100%” and “Be a host” – taking responsibility for migrations on behalf of teams.

In this talk, I’ll share how we built tooling, infrastructure, and guidance to enable rapid, large-scale AI-driven migrations. Through some case studies, you’ll learn how these principles are letting us scale migrations across the company, the new challenges we faced (like review bottlenecks), and practical lessons for anyone looking to accelerate migrations in their own organization.

Key takeaways:

  • How migration tenets like “be a host” and “complete to 100%” are foundational for accelerating migrations with AI by changing the planning, ownership, and tooling approach
  • The specific tools and infrastructure we’ve built to scale AI-accelerated migrations and make them self-serve and repeable
  • The key points we use to train our migration owners to help deliver successful AI-accelerated migrations
  • And some of the bottlenecks and hurdles we’ve hit doing this (some we’ve addressed, some we haven’t yet)
12:30–13:55

Lunch

13:55

Talk

Distinguished Engineer•Principal Engineer•Staff Engineer

The magic of crisis

Discover how Staff+ engineers can use moments of crisis to drive lasting technical change and strengthen organizational systems.

+ More

Talk

The magic of crisis

This session is suitable for:

Distinguished Engineer•Principal Engineer•Staff Engineer

A crisis is a transformative moment for an organization. If you’re prepared, and with a little luck, it can be an ideal moment to make big technical changes.

All organizations experience crises. An existential threat from a competitor, a highly visible outage, or a disruptive reorg can all land you in the same place. The organization has to adapt to continue to exist. New habits and coordination structures are required. Team members have to perform at their best, and do it while stressed and short of time.

In such conditions, change is coming to your organization. As a Staff+ engineer, you have a key role to play. I’ll show how listeners can direct and shape the changes, leaving systems and structures that are stronger than before.

Key takeaways

  • How to identify a useful crisis conditions
  • What can staff+ leaders contribute in a crisis?
  • Technical capabilities you might want before a crisis
  • FEATURING
    Carla Geisser
    Partner, Crisis EngineerLayer Aleph

    Carla Geisser is a partner at Layer Aleph, where she works with organizations in crisis to quickly repair complex systems. Her past work spans Fastly, Google and multiple federal agencies with the United States Digital Service. She loves debugging systems that span software and human components.

    View Carla’s profile
14:25

Talk

Distinguished Engineer•Principal Engineer•Staff Engineer

Building Figma

Explore how a small, scrappy team at Figma turned a big product vision into a major launch through smart execution.

+ More

Talk

Building Figma

This session is suitable for:

Distinguished Engineer•Principal Engineer•Staff Engineer

This talk will describe the process of building one of the flagship new feature areas that Figma launched at its annual conference this year (May 2025). I’ll talk through how I turned a small team, a lot of passions, and a large mandate into a successful product launch.

For the past year I’ve been the lead engineer and de facto product manager for a large new product area at Figma. In just a few months, armed with only a handful of engineers and a huge product mandate, our team had to be efficient, resourceful, and most importantly, needed to have a lot of fun in order to deliver such an expansive feature set. Follow along our journey to unlock entirely new ways of being creative with Figma: our successes, our mistakes, and unexpected experiences all the while navigating a highly performance-sensitive front-end C++ stack.

Key takeaways

  • How having a strong technical perspective from the start is key to building an efficient roadmap
  • How building partnerships with other engineering teams can stretch your headcount a long way
  • How to continually prioritize, adapt, and communicate about product decisions
  • How to continually develop buy-in with leadership and give your team space in doing so
  • How to build a happy team, and how to delegate, trust, and build leaders within your team

  • FEATURING
    Lauren Budorick
    Senior Staff EngineerFigma

    Lauren Budorick is a Senior Staff Engineer at Figma, where she works on the core Figma editor. She is passionate about building great product and healthy engineering teams. Before Figma she worked at Mapbox on the Mapbox GL map rendering engine, but her love for design tools stems from a previous life as a designer and art major. Outside of computers, she loves skiing, making pottery, and spending time with her partner and dogs.

    View Lauren’s profile
14:55

Talk

Distinguished Engineer•Principal Engineer•Staff Engineer

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.

+ More

Talk

Compiler makeover: How technical debt created happier developers

This session is suitable for:

Distinguished Engineer•Principal Engineer•Staff Engineer

Technical debt often carries negative connotations—as an inevitable burden rather than a pathway to innovation.

At WSO2, by 2020, incremental fixes for the Ballerina compiler and its VSCode plugin fell short of addressing deeper developer experience issues. Instead of viewing these challenges solely as debt, we reframed them as opportunities for innovation, professional growth, and enhanced developer satisfaction.

This talk shares experiences from my journey transforming technical debt into strategic improvements through a comprehensive redesign toward a responsive, real-time compiler architecture. Key strategies included empowering engineers, clear and transparent communication, and maintaining community trust. By repositioning technical debt positively, we significantly improved developer productivity and innovation capabilities.

You will gain practical insights into leveraging technical challenges to propel innovation, engineer growth, and community development. This talk will be a retrospective of that journey, exploring what worked and what didn’t.

Key takeaways:

  • Technical debt can be reframed as a powerful driver for innovation and growth.
  • Effective communication is critical when introducing significant technical changes.
  • Prioritizing developer satisfaction can dramatically enhance productivity and community engagement.
  • Successful transformations require empowering your engineers and fostering trust.
15:05

Talk

Distinguished Engineer•Principal Engineer•Staff Engineer

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.

+ More

Talk

How to lead when you just don’t know the tech

This session is suitable for:

Distinguished Engineer•Principal Engineer•Staff Engineer

As a Staff Engineer, uncertainty is a given. But sometimes, it lands right where it stings the most—on the expectation that you’re the technical expert. This talk is about my own experience leading initiatives where I didn’t have expertise in the tech at hand and how, despite that, a team can still be inspired, empowered, and deliver great results. I’ll share what worked, what didn’t, and the lessons I’ve carried forward about leading without always being “the expert.” Whether you’ve been in this position before or just want to be ready when it happens, this session will give you a candid look at turning uncertainty into strength.

Key takeaways:

  • Confidence that effective leadership doesn’t require mastering every technical detail.
  • Strategies to empower teams and foster collaboration in unfamiliar technical domains.
  • Techniques to turn uncertainty into an opportunity for growth and innovation.
  • Insights into building trust and credibility while navigating new challenges.
  • FEATURING
    Lorena Salamanca
    Staff EngineerPicnic Technologies

    Lorena is a staff engineer with a track record spanning hands-on development, technical leadership, and engineering management. She’s led initiatives across a range of technologies and domains, working with teams of all shapes and sizes to deliver impactful, cross-disciplinary solutions.

    Currently learning and driving how to bring observability as a first-class citizen that’s horizontal to any of the implementations in Picnic in a coordinated and efficient way.

    View Lorena’s profile
15:35–16:05

Afternoon Break

16:05

Talk

Distinguished Engineer•Principal Engineer•Staff Engineer

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.

+ More

Talk

The lean architect: Experimenting your way to better decisions

This session is suitable for:

Distinguished Engineer•Principal Engineer•Staff Engineer

This talk introduces hypothesis-driven development as a method for validating architectural choices. We’ll explore how to design experiments that provide actionable data, allowing teams to make informed decisions and adapt to changing requirements.

As a Staff+ engineer, you’re expected to lead complex, cross-functional initiatives, align teams around technical direction, and deliver meaningful outcomes – all in the face of ambiguity and rapid change. Yet the most important architectural decisions often happen early in a project – precisely when knowledge is limited and uncertainty is highest.

To lead effectively in this environment, you need a mindset shift: embrace the role of a lean architect and treat architecture as a series of testable hypotheses. Validate decisions early – while changes are still inexpensive and easy to make. Start small. Build steel threads: thin, end-to-end slices that deliver value and surface insight. Use them to ask sharper questions:

  • Will this pattern scale in production?
  • Are our boundaries enabling speed or creating new bottlenecks?
  • What is real-world usage telling us about our assumptions?

By experimenting your way to better decisions, you create space for smarter choices and generate the feedback needed to shape architecture. As successful patterns emerge, your team can invest with confidence – steadily building scalable, resilient systems one iteration at a time.

  • FEATURING
    Maxime Najim
    Distinguished EngineerTarget

    With two decades of experience building resilient, scalable systems, Maxime has had the privilege of working with engineering teams at Yahoo!, Apple, Netflix, and Amazon. Today, as a distinguished engineer at Target, he partners closely with senior engineering leaders—directors, VPs, and principal architects—to navigate complex technical challenges and align architectural decisions with business goals.

    This often means driving experimentation, fostering cultural shifts, and helping teams adapt how they work to enable growth and innovation. Whether it’s digging into the root cause of persistent issues or shaping strategic initiatives, he focuses on surfacing patterns, clarifying trade-offs, and guiding teams toward pragmatic, scalable solutions. Above all, he loves learning—and sharing what he has learned with others. He’s passionate about helping teams grow, evolve, and tackle the hard problems together.

    View Maxime’s profile
16:35

Talk

Distinguished Engineer•Principal Engineer•Staff Engineer

Beyond the prototype – an engineer’s guide to impactful POCs

How do you take an idea from a Proof of Concept (POC) to a scalable implementation? This talk breaks down a structured approach to planning, scoping, executing, and deploying POCs in phases.

+ More

Talk

Beyond the prototype – an engineer’s guide to impactful POCs

This session is suitable for:

Distinguished Engineer•Principal Engineer•Staff Engineer

Many organizations run POCs to validate new technologies, enhance data infrastructure, or improve decision-making, but these efforts often fail due to unclear goals, lack of stakeholder alignment, or execution challenges.

This talk presents a structured approach to leading successful POCs that scale beyond the experimental phase and drive meaningful impact. I will share a practical, repeatable framework covering:

  • Defining success criteria to align technical efforts with business needs
  • Scoping and structuring POCs for rapid iteration without sacrificing long-term scalability
  • Engaging stakeholders early to secure buy-in and resources
  • Implementing in phases to gather feedback, reduce risks, and optimize for production readiness
  • Transitioning validated POCs into production environments with minimal disruption
  • Attendees will leave with actionable strategies to execute and scale POCs effectively, ensuring they deliver measurable value and do not remain proof-of-concepts forever.

Key takeaways:

  • A structured approach to defining, scoping, and executing POCs effectively.
  • Strategies for securing stakeholder buy-in and ensuring alignment.
  • Techniques for phased implementation and iterative improvements.
  • Common pitfalls to avoid when transitioning POCs to production.
  • Practical insights from real-world case studies.
16:45

Talk

Distinguished Engineer•Principal Engineer•Staff Engineer

Mind the gap: Navigating the staff+ performance cliff

Explore why new Staff+ leaders often feel lost and how to rebuild confidence, clarity, and impact after the transition.

+ More

Talk

Mind the gap: Navigating the staff+ performance cliff

This session is suitable for:

Distinguished Engineer•Principal Engineer•Staff Engineer

Making the leap from team-focused engineer to org-level technical leader can feel like freefall. Suddenly, your old ways of working and measuring success no longer apply. You’re overwhelmed, directionless, and wondering if you even belong in this role. Sound familiar? You’re not alone.

This talk introduces the concept of the Performance Cliff, a psychological shift that explains why highly capable engineers often feel lost when stepping into broader influence. Drawing on years of mentoring and hard-won lessons, the speaker will explore practical strategies to reframe your mindset, build new systems of success, and thrive in the ambiguity of Staff+ org leadership.

Over the last several years of mentoring other Staff+ engineers, the speaker has had many conversations that follow a similar pattern:

“I recently moved from being a team leader to being an org leader, and I have no idea what I’m supposed to be doing / I feel like I’m failing / I’m overwhelmed by all of the work on my plate / I’m lost and confused / maybe this isn’t the right role for me / I feel so alone.”

If this resonates, you’re not alone. The speaker experienced the same thing when moving from a Staff Engineer role on a team to an Architect role with broad responsibility across many teams. Despite working toward this transition for years, the shift felt disorienting. It created a sense of failure, uncertainty, and fear of being found out. But that reaction is not a sign of inadequacy – it’s a normal response to a major change.

This talk is for anyone who has stepped into a larger role and quietly wondered if they’re the only one struggling.

  • FEATURING
    Katie Sylor-Miller
    Web Tech LeadSquare

    Katie Sylor-Miller, Principal Engineer and Web Tech Lead at Square (formerly Frontend Architect at Etsy), has a passion for design systems, web performance, accessibility, frontend infrastructure, and the practice of Staff Engineering. As an invited expert on the W3C Web Performance Working group, she helps to guide browsers towards improving Web Performance APIs. As co-author of the Design Systems Handbook she helped to share best practices for engineering a design system with engineers and designers. She’s spoken about her multitude of specialities at conferences like Performance.now(), Lead Dev Staff+, Smashing, PerfMatters, and JSConf US (to name a few). Beyond her day job, her website ohshitgit.com (and the swear-free version dangitgit.com) has helped millions of people worldwide get out of their Git messes (and has been translated into 28 different languages and counting), and led to a collaboration with Julia Evans of Wizard Zines on an Oh Shit Git Zine.

    When she’s not architecting, you can find Katie spending time with her family, skiing, or visiting the country’s best tiki bars. Say hi to Katie at @ksylor@front-end.social on Mastodon, and check out her site at sylormiller.com.

    View Katie’s profile
17:15

Talk

End of day wrap-up

Closing thoughts from the hosts.

+ More

Talk

End of day wrap-up

This session is suitable for:

Closing thoughts from the host.

  • FEATURING
    Maude Lemaire
    Principal EngineerGitHub

    Maude is a Principal Engineer at GitHub. Most recently, she was a Senior Staff Engineer at Slack where she was founder and technical lead for the backend performance infrastructure team. She was responsible for large-scale load test tooling, performance regression monitoring, and successfully onboarding the world’s largest companies to Slack. For nearly 8 years, she 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 profile
  • Tanya Reilly
    Principal EngineerDatadog

    Tanya Reilly is a principal engineer at Datadog and the author of The Staff Engineer’s Path. Originally from Ireland, she spent a decade in New York and now lives in sunny New Mexico.

    View Tanya’s profile
INTERACTIVE SESSIONS
11:00
12:00

Office Hours

Meet the speakers

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

+ More

Office Hours

Meet the speakers

This session is suitable for:

Chat with the speakers face-to-face in a relaxed, conversational environment.
12:00

Community Representation Groups

Women leaders

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

+ More

Community Representation Groups

Women leaders

This session is suitable for:

Connect with folks over shared experiences

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

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

  • FEATURING
    Shilpa Kintali
    Engineering ManagerEtsy
    View Shilpa’s profile
  • Kat Ross
    Engineering ManagerSpotify

    Kat is currently an Engineering Manager at Spotify where she leads teams to develop new non-intrusive ad formats to support the free tier. Prior to Spotify, Kat worked at a startup called Teachable, and at Capital One. She is based in Brooklyn, NY – where she holds the belief that Brooklyn beats Manhattan in almost all categories (save museums, maybe). Outside of work, Kat loves to read, run (the marathon this year!), knit, and share her opinions with any and all that will listen to them.

    View profile
  • Nisarga Markandaiah
    Engineering ManagerSpotify
    View Nisarga’s profile
11:45
12:00

Table Talks

How do you impact the technical standards of your org as a staff+ leader?

Join facilitated conversations and dive into key issues facing engineering teams

+ More

Table Talks

How do you impact the technical standards of your org as a staff+ leader?

This session is suitable for:

Join facilitated conversations and dive into key issues facing engineering teams

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

  • FEATURING
    Beth Crane
    Staff Software EngineerFlatiron Health
    View Beth’s profile
  • Varun Saravagi
    Staff Software EngineerMeta
    View Varun’s profile
  • Daniel Lee
    Financial PlannerBrightPlan

    Daniel S Lee, CFA, CFP, is a financial planner who provides clear, unbiased advice to help busy individuals make smart financial choices. He is an award-winning instructor at UC Berkeley Extension and serves on the advisory board of the UC Berkeley Personal Financial Planning Program. He is a member of the CFA Society of Orange County, and leads the financial planning team as the Director of Financial Planning and Advice at BrightPlan, a leading financial wellness benefit provider.

    View Daniel’s profile
12:00

Speed Coaching

Speed coaching

Watch or participate in free 1:1 coaching with Fiona Siseman

+ More

Speed Coaching

Speed coaching

This session is suitable for:

Watch or participate in free 1:1 coaching with Fiona Siseman.

  • FEATURING
    Fiona Siseman
    Co-founder, Coach & FacilitatorFrank & Eddy Leadership

    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).

    View Fiona’s profile
12:00

Solution Swap

Building cross-functional relationships

Trade tactics for tackling everyday challenges.

+ More

Solution Swap

Building cross-functional relationships

This session is suitable for:

Trade tactics for tackling everyday challenges

Sometimes it can feel like every problem has only one answer – but the truth is, in leadership there’s never a single solution. But when you’re in the thick of a problem, it can be hard to get the headspace to see other ways to tackle a challenge. 

In our solution swap sessions, attendees will get the chance to say how they’d tackle a common issue and compare their ideas with how other leaders would confront the same problem. Our coaches will give direct feedback about the possible consequences (both positive and negative) of the ideas – and will ask the key question – if you were to do this, and then this happened – what would you do next?

  • FEATURING
    Alia Rose Connor
    Co-founder, Coach & FacilitatorFrank & Eddy Leadership

    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.

    View Alia’s profile
12:30
12:00

Table Talks

How do you work effectively on cross-team projects as a staff+ leader?

Join facilitated conversations and dive into key issues facing engineering teams

+ More

Table Talks

How do you work effectively on cross-team projects as a staff+ leader?

This session is suitable for:

Join facilitated conversations and dive into key issues facing engineering teams

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

  • FEATURING
    Paul Revello
    Staff Cloud Solutions ArchitectGoogle
    View Paul’s profile
  • Hahnara Hyun
    Sr Compute Specialist Solution ArchitectAmazon Web Services

    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.

    View Hahnara’s profile
  • Vlad Leyberov
    Engineering Manager (Site Reliability Engineering)Google

    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.

    View Vlad’s profile
12:00

Speed Coaching

Speed coaching

Watch or participate in free 1:1 coaching with Fiona Siseman

+ More

Speed Coaching

Speed coaching

This session is suitable for:

Watch or participate in free 1:1 coaching with Fiona Siseman.

  • FEATURING
    Fiona Siseman
    Co-founder, Coach & FacilitatorFrank & Eddy Leadership

    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).

    View Fiona’s profile
12:00

Solution Swap

Leading without authority

Trade tactics for tackling everyday challenges.

+ More

Solution Swap

Leading without authority

This session is suitable for:

Trade tactics for tackling everyday challenges

Sometimes it can feel like every problem has only one answer – but the truth is, in leadership there’s never a single solution. But when you’re in the thick of a problem, it can be hard to get the headspace to see other ways to tackle a challenge. 

In our solution swap sessions, attendees will get the chance to say how they’d tackle a common issue and compare their ideas with how other leaders would confront the same problem. Our coaches will give direct feedback about the possible consequences (both positive and negative) of the ideas – and will ask the key question – if you were to do this, and then this happened – what would you do next?

  • FEATURING
    Alia Rose Connor
    Co-founder, Coach & FacilitatorFrank & Eddy Leadership

    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.

    View Alia’s profile
12:00

Office Hours

Meet the speakers

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

+ More

Office Hours

Meet the speakers

This session is suitable for:

Chat with the speakers face-to-face in a relaxed, conversational environment.
12:00

Industry Interest Groups

Meet leaders from the Media and Entertainment domain

Join our relaxed sessions where you can meet peers working in similar domains to share ideas, collaborate on challenges and exchange solutions.

+ More

Industry Interest Groups

Meet leaders from the Media and Entertainment domain

This session is suitable for:

Join our relaxed sessions where you can meet peers working in similar domains to share ideas, collaborate on challenges and exchange solutions.

  • FEATURING
    David Simmer
    Senior Software EngineerNetflix

    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.

    View David’s profile
  • Darnel Clayton
    Former Engineering ManagerSpotify
    View Darnel’s profile
  • Meg Adams
    Senior Director of EngineeringThe New York Times

    Meg Adams is an experienced technology leader sought out by multi-billion dollar companies like Estée Lauder, Etsy, and Condé Nast to create cultures of high performance and high engagement within their engineering teams.

    She is passionate about deepening the community of workplaces and infusing the everyday with joy and purpose, all while increasing profitability. Meg is also a trusted advisor to remarkable women when it comes to career development and negotiation.

    View Meg’s profile
12:00

Next Steps AMA

Making the leap to Engineering Manager

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

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Next Steps AMA

Making the leap to Engineering Manager

This session is suitable for:

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

  • FEATURING
    Esther Kundin
    Engineering ManagerGoogle

    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.

    View Esther’s profile
  • Jimil Patel
    Engineering ManagerStash

    Jimil is an Engineering Manager at Stash, a financial platform dedicated to empowering people to invest and build better lives. He is an experienced engineering leader with a diverse background in engineering roles across tech companies of all sizes and a passion for nurturing talent and empowering individuals though mentoring and coaching, and building high performing teams.

    Jimil has previously spoken at multiple tech conferences. Outside of work, Jimil enjoys spending time with his 4 year old daughter and playing/watching cricket.

    View Jimil’s profile
  • Jiovanni Rosario
    Engineering ManagerAmazon

    Jiovanni Rosario has had multiple tech industry roles. He started as a controls engineer, moved into sales engineering, and has been a software developer & instructor. Today, Jiovanni is a controls engineering manager, leveraging his unique background to support a team of engineers servicing data centers. He is passionate about coaching and mentoring and wants to help engineers learn about management.

    View Jiovanni’s profile
  • Mica Alaniz 
    Senior Engineering ManagerSlack

    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 an Engineering Manager on the Enterprise 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 Engineering Manager at the Democratic National Committee; where she built tools to support Democratic candidates and campaigns and to empower 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, whether it be through local neighborhood organizations or through being a Code2040 Fellows Program Mentor Coach. She also gives talks, teaches workshops and offers career 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, conquering roguelike video games and having this thing with coffee where she needs it to live.

    View Mica’s profile
12:00

Community Representation Groups

Parent leaders

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

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Community Representation Groups

Parent leaders

This session is suitable for:

Connect with folks over shared experiences

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

  • FEATURING
    Mary Parsons
    Engineering ManagerDefense Unicorns

    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.

    View Mary’s profile
  • Dan Ubilla
    Engineering ManagerAsana

    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.

    View Dan’s profile
  • Gargee Anjikar
    Engineering ManagerRenaissance Learning

    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.

    View Gargee’s profile
14:00
12:00

Next Steps AMA

Diving into the role of Engineering Director

Dedicated sessions on how to take the next step in your career for preparing for the role of an Engineering Director

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Next Steps AMA

Diving into the role of Engineering Director

This session is suitable for:

Dedicated sessions on how to take the next step in your career for preparing for the role of an Engineering Director

  • FEATURING
    Hanna Feibus
    Engineering DirectorCedar

    Hanna is an Engineering Director at Cedar, where she focuses on what it takes to build and scale 0-to-1 products and the teams that support them. She’s passionate about growing technical leaders and engineering managers, having navigated that career path herself at Cedar. When she’s not building products that address the patient financial pain points of the U.S. healthcare system, she enjoys rock climbing and playing long-form board games.

    View Hanna’s profile
  • Jon Thornton
    Principal EngineerSquarespace

     

    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.

    View Jon ‘s profile
  • Allison Malloy
    Director of EngineeringShopify

    Allison Malloy is the Director of Engineering for Shopify’s Merchandising product area which includes the search & discovery experience, products and pricing, and supporting merchants’ selling strategies. Over the course of her 4 years at Shopify, she had led a few different areas: the Inventory Management team and Shopify Fulfillment Network’s Delivery Infrastructure team focused on providing 2-day delivery through advanced inventory management and distribution. Prior to joining Shopify, Allison spent many years in the defence and aerospace sector, including leading the engineering effort at SkyDrop (prev. Flirtey), a drone delivery company; working in a variety of leadership and development roles at Kongsberg Geospatial and General Dynamics.

     

    View Allison ‘s profile
  • Jared Silver
    Senior Director of EngineeringBrilliant

    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.

    View Jared’s profile
12:00

Community Representation Groups

Latinx leaders

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

+ More

Community Representation Groups

Latinx leaders

This session is suitable for:

Connect with folks over shared experiences

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

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

  • FEATURING
    Davidson Fellipe
    Senior Software EngineerUpgrade

    Davidson works as a Senior Software Engineer at Upgrade, where he focuses on front-end development for banking products. He has experience as an Engineering Manager at Salesforce, leading UI components for the Commerce Search Platform, and as a Founding Engineer and later Manager at Loadsmart, where he spent nearly seven years building and scaling. Prior to relocating to the US, he developed large-scale applications at Globo.com.

    Based in Brooklyn since 2015, he blends front-end craftsmanship and user experience with hands-on leadership to help engineering teams work better together.

    View Davidson’s profile
  • Melissa Young
    SVP, EngineeringVox Media

    Melissa Young is SVP of Engineering at Vox Media, where she leads a multidisciplinary engineering organization spanning publishing platforms, infrastructure, advertising technology, data, consumer revenue, and commerce. She has over 15 years of experience working and leading in media technology enterprises ranging from small private publishers to large media conglomerates. Melissa thrives at the intersection of technical strategy, operational optimization and organizational leadership and will forever champion empowering engineers and leaders to create and support high-trust, high-performing teams.

    View Melissa’s profile
  • Francisco Trindade
    VP of EngineeringBraze

    Francisco Trindade is an engineering leader who has been around the block. He has worked as a technology consultant for ThoughtWorks, helping teams in different countries, from writing code for startups in the UK to enabling change in large enterprises in Australia. He has founded companies more than once and managed broader engineering organizations, having experience managing teams in many different environments. He is now an Engineering Director in New York, still constantly thinking about making engineers work better together.

    View Francisco’s profile
14:30
12:00

Table Talks

How can AI be leveraged in day to day workflows?

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

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Table Talks

How can AI be leveraged in day to day workflows?

This session is suitable for:

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

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

  • FEATURING
    Zeel Patel
    Engineering ManagerAmazon

    Zeel is results-driven Engineering Manager with 8+ years of experience driving cloud innovation, improving operational efficiency, and driving customer success. Currently spearheading a dynamic team of 23+ engineers at AWS, overseeing critical big data services including EMR, Bedrock, Sagemaker, DynamoDB. Deep technical proficiency in AWS ecosystem including Devops, Bigdata, Compute, Storage, Database, Machine learning, and Serverless technologies. Proven track record of transforming low-performing teams into high-impact engineering groups through strategic leadership, technical mentorship, and data-driven decision making. Passionate about developing next-generation tech talent through strategic academic partnerships and creating robust early-career development programs.

    View Zeel’s profile
  • Pavel Ivanov
    Software EngineerAirtable

    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.

    View Pavel’s profile
  • Mallika Rao
    Engineering ManagerNetflix

    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.

    View Mallika’s profile
  • Julien Veneziano
    Senior Engineering ManagerSquarespace

    Julien is a Senior Engineering Manager at Squarespace on the Commerce Transactions Group with 10 years of experience helping organizations with launching and scaling organizations. Specializing in payments and mobile, Julien uses that experience to lead the teams that enable millions of people to transact on the squarespace platform. He enjoys a good cup of espresso, designed processes and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu; not always in that order.

    View Julien’s profile
12:00

Speed Coaching

Speed coaching

Watch or participate in free 1:1 coaching with Fabian Camargo

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Speed Coaching

Speed coaching

This session is suitable for:

Watch or participate in free 1:1 coaching with Fabian Camargo.

  • FEATURING
    Fabian Camargo
    Owner, Leadership & Management CoachCamargo Consulting LLC

    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).

    View Fabian’s profile
15:00
12:00

Solution Swap

Talented engineers on my team want to advance their careers, but there aren’t opportunities available for advancement. How can I keep them motivated?

Trade tactics for tackling everyday challenges.

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Solution Swap

Talented engineers on my team want to advance their careers, but there aren’t opportunities available for advancement. How can I keep them motivated?

This session is suitable for:

Trade tactics for tackling everyday challenges

Sometimes it can feel like every problem has only one answer – but the truth is, in leadership there’s never a single solution. But when you’re in the thick of a problem, it can be hard to get the headspace to see other ways to tackle a challenge. 

In our solution swap sessions, attendees will get the chance to say how they’d tackle a common issue and compare their ideas with how other leaders would confront the same problem. Our coaches will give direct feedback about the possible consequences (both positive and negative) of the ideas – and will ask the key question – if you were to do this, and then this happened – what would you do next?

  • FEATURING
    Alia Rose Connor
    Co-founder, Coach & FacilitatorFrank & Eddy Leadership

    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.

    View Alia’s profile
12:00

Table Talks

How do you make technical decisions that balance benefits and tradeoffs?

Join facilitated conversations and dive into key issues facing engineering teams

+ More

Table Talks

How do you make technical decisions that balance benefits and tradeoffs?

This session is suitable for:

Join facilitated conversations and dive into key issues facing engineering teams

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

  • FEATURING
    Eric Rafalovsky
    Group Technical LeadAsana
    View Eric’s profile
  • James Brookbank
    Cloud Solutions Architect ManagerGoogle

    James Brookbank is a cloud solutions architect manager at Google based in NYC. Solution architects help make cloud easier for Google’s customers by solving complex technical problems and providing expert architectural guidance. Before joining Google, James worked at a number of large enterprises with a focus on IT infrastructure and financial services.

    View James’s profile
  • Zeel Patel
    Engineering ManagerAmazon

    Zeel is results-driven Engineering Manager with 8+ years of experience driving cloud innovation, improving operational efficiency, and driving customer success. Currently spearheading a dynamic team of 23+ engineers at AWS, overseeing critical big data services including EMR, Bedrock, Sagemaker, DynamoDB. Deep technical proficiency in AWS ecosystem including Devops, Bigdata, Compute, Storage, Database, Machine learning, and Serverless technologies. Proven track record of transforming low-performing teams into high-impact engineering groups through strategic leadership, technical mentorship, and data-driven decision making. Passionate about developing next-generation tech talent through strategic academic partnerships and creating robust early-career development programs.

    View Zeel’s profile
  • Boomie Odumade
    Senior Engineering LeaderTechBees

    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.

    View Boomie’s profile
12:00

Speed Coaching

Speed coaching

Watch or participate in free 1:1 coaching with Fabian Camargo

+ More

Speed Coaching

Speed coaching

This session is suitable for:

Watch or participate in free 1:1 coaching with Fabian Camargo.

  • FEATURING
    Fabian Camargo
    Owner, Leadership & Management CoachCamargo Consulting LLC

    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).

    View Fabian’s profile
15:45
12:00

Community Representation Groups

Disabled leaders

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

+ More

Community Representation Groups

Disabled leaders

This session is suitable for:

Connect with folks over shared experiences

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

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

  • FEATURING
    Kirti Bhardwaj
    Software EngineerGocardless
    View Kirti’s profile
  • Ben Parisot
    Engineering ManagerPlanet Argon

    Ben Parisot is the Engineering Manager at Planet Argon, where he leads efforts to improve development processes, support engineer growth, and boost team morale. He builds internal tools with JavaScript, React, and TypeScript, and champions inclusive hiring and LGBTQ+ representation in tech. At Planet Argon, he has revamped hiring workflows, restructured onboarding documentation, created role advancement systems, launched an internship program, improved developer satisfaction metrics, enforced TDD and Rails best practices, and managed internal security protocols and contractor relationships. His work consistently saves time and money while strengthening both the developer experience and overall team performance.

    View Ben’s profile
  • Aaron Moses
    Software Engineering Team LeadBBC
    View Aaron’s profile
12:00

Office Hours

Meet the speakers

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

+ More

Office Hours

Meet the speakers

This session is suitable for:

Chat with the speakers face-to-face in a relaxed, conversational environment.
12:00

Next Steps AMA

Becoming a VP of Engineering

Dedicated sessions on how to take the next step in your career for Becoming a VP of Engineering

+ More

Next Steps AMA

Becoming a VP of Engineering

This session is suitable for:

Dedicated sessions on how to take the next step in your career for Becoming a VP of Engineering

  • FEATURING
    Surya (Prashanth) Sanagavarapu
    SVP of EngineeringVTS
    View Surya (Prashanth)’s profile
  • Alina Oganesova
    VP of Software EngineeringIntelligent Medical Objects
    View Alina’s profile
  • Claudio Meira
    VP of TechnologyNJI Media
    View Claudio’s profile
  • Adam Berman
    VP of Engineering Semgrep

    Adam Berman is the VP of Engineering at Semgrep, building static analysis tools to improve software security. He enjoys the pendulum between IC and Manager, and has built multiple teams and products at Semgrep and Meraki. Adam is a bay area local, a proud holder of a US National Parks pass, and an ultimate frisbee player.

    View Adam’s profile
  • Neha Batra
    VP of EngineeringGitHub

    Neha Batra is a VP of Engineering at GitHub, where she leads the Core Productivity org that focuses on the tools in developer’s daily workflows like Repos, Projects, Issues, Pull Requests, Desktop, CLI, and Mobile. Her passion lies in making the tech industry easier and more inclusive to work in, which is why she focuses her talks and blogs on tactical tips and tricks, like Facilitation 202, Managing your Mentorship, and Delegation.

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

    View Neha’s profile
WORKSHOP TRACK
12:00

Workshop

Making your Staff+ impact visible

Practical workshop equipping Staff+ engineers with tools to showcase achievements, amplify influence, strengthen reputation, and gain recognition across organizations.

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Workshop

Making your Staff+ impact visible

This session is suitable for:

Practical strategies to amplify your  influence and get your leadership, expertise, and impact recognized across your organization and beyond, 

You’ve just landed a new Staff+ position — congratulations! But here’s the catch: the bar for your impact has just skyrocketed. You’re now expected to influence entire teams and shape the organization’s direction — yet much of that work is invisible, hard to measure, and might feel undervalued.

If your contributions feel underestimated or invisible—slowing your growth—you’re not alone. As a Staff+ engineer, the challenge isn’t just doing the work—it’s ensuring that work is seen and recognized.

The workshop “Building Visibility as a Staff+ Engineer” will help senior individual contributors develop actionable strategies to increase recognition for their leadership, expertise, and impact within and beyond their organizations. 

Attendees will practice hands-on tools to articulate their achievements and foster recognition from peers, stakeholders, and the broader industry.

In this workshop you’ll learn how to:

  • Map your visibility gaps and opportunities with a practical perception worksheet
  • Turn everyday artifacts into multipliers (use design docs, updates, and PRs) to communicate impact effectively
  • Leverage recognition tools like kudos, interviews, and initiatives to strengthen your internal reputation
  • Apply key communication skills to position your work
  • FEATURING
    Krys Flores
    Staff Software EngineerCrunchyroll

    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.

    View Krys’s profile