Michael is a Silicon Valley-based engineering leader who builds both people and product at companies such as Borland, Netscape, Palantir, and Apple. While he's not worrying about staying relevant, he writes about pens, bridges, people, poker, and werewolves at the popular weblog, 'Rands in Repose'. He currently works as the VP of Engineering at Slack in San Francisco.

(Lara is hosting a workshop as well! See below) Lara is an author, public speaker, and coach for managers and leaders across the tech industry. As a founder of Wherewithall, Lara and her team run workshops, roundtables, and trainings on core management skills like delivering great feedback and setting clear expectations. Before Wherewithall, Lara spent a decade growing emerging leaders as the VP of Engineering at Kickstarter and an Engineering Director at Etsy. She champions management as a practice, building fast websites, and celebrating your achievements with donuts (and sometimes sushi). Her latest book, Resilient Management, is here to help those who find themselves responsible for supporting a team of people.

Kwasi is the VP of Engineering at Goodwater Capital, where he indulges his passion for entrepreneurship by contributing to finding and building the very best consumer technology companies. He serves by offering his diverse skillset in leadership, entrepreneurship and engineering. Previously, Kwasi was founding engineer at Highfive, where he built and led teams in backend infrastructure services. Prior to Highfive, Kwasi was founding engineer at Color Labs, where he built and and led the Android team. Prior to startups and venture capital, he had a successful engineering tenure at Google, where he was one of the first members on Google's then new Google+ social initiative. He is happiest when building high performing teams as well as technology.

Nidhi Gupta is former Chief Product Officer at Hired, a marketplace that matches tech talent with the world’s most innovative companies. At Hired, Nidhi led the company’s global product, design, engineering, and operations teams. Nidhi is a skilled engineer and product executive who is passionate about building and growing thriving product and engineering organizations that deliver world-class products at scale. Prior to Hired, Nidhi was Senior Vice President of Product and Engineering at Tophatter and Upwork. Previously, she was instrumental in leading mobiTV and Ning through hyper-growth and expansion.

Ale is the Head of Engineering at Code Climate where she helps engineering leaders with data insights. With over 9 years of technical experience, she is passionate about growing an inclusive team and help foster an environment where everyone can grow their skills, do their best work, build resilient and scalable systems and deliver impactful solutions. Also, Ale is one of the founders of Latinas in Tech NYC.

Billie Sue Chafins has spent 18+ years shipping world-class consumer and enterprise software for large consumer technology companies, with over 12 years of experience managing teams. She is currently VP of Software Development at Hulu, where she leads all client development across mobile, web, and living room devices (like Xbox One, Playstation 4, Nintendo Switch, and Amazon FireTV). In this role, she manages a team of 130+ developers, technical program managers, and QA team members, responsible for delivering the best experience for our viewers across all devices. Billie Sue is also the Head of Hulu’s Seattle Office, where she is responsible the decision-making and operations of the company’s office in Seattle. Prior to Hulu, Billie Sue spent 14 years at Microsoft, leading several teams responsible for products like Windows UX and Office. She holds a BS and MS from the University of Kentucky in Computer Science.

Kathleen Vignos is a Director in Platform Engineering at Twitter, where she heads Twitter’s public cloud strategy and core infrastructure automation teams. She also leads Twitter’s internal engineering manager training program. Previously, she was Director of Engineering at Wired where she built the team that scaled the website to 1 billion page views a year. Over 20+ years she’s worked at two startups (one of which she founded), taught business software programming at the university level, won a hackathon, and developed dozens of websites. She regularly coaches engineering managers and female engineers on confidence and leadership. She serves on the Ambassador’s Council for local San Francisco non-profit, New Door Ventures.

(Jean is co-hosting a workshop! See below) Jean is a co-founder of Co Leadership, a leadership development company for leaders in tech. She is passionate about sharing her people-centric leadership style with teams from small start-ups to larger companies. Having worked at Google, Pulse, and Medium before moving into leadership coaching and development, Jean brings a wealth of experience in both engineering and coaching to bridge engineers to the lives and careers they dream of.

(Edmond is co-hosting a workshop! See below) Edmond Lau is the co-founder of Co Leadership, where his mission is to transform engineers into leaders. He runs leadership experiences and courses that teach people powerful tools and frameworks to bridge them from where they are to what's possible in their lives and careers. He's also the author of the book, The Effective Engineer — now the de facto onboarding guide for many engineering teams. He's spent his career leading engineering teams across Silicon Valley at Quip, Quora, Google, and Opixoyala. His work and writing have been featured in the New York Times, Forbes, Time, Slate, Inc., Fortune, and Wired.

Cathy Chen currently leads an engineering team at Google, and previously has managed people at startups. With Capriole Consulting, she specializes in coaching tech leaders enabling the development of their own skills in leading teams. With her masters degree in Organizational Psychology from Teacher's College at Columbia University and a BS in Electrical Engineering Computer Science from UC Berkeley, she has the background of a hands-on geek, with expertise in research-backed organizational theory.

Tara Ellis is an avid tinkerer and has been since the early days of the world wide web. As a critical and creative thinker, she is a relentless problem-solver skilled at applying critical thinking, analysis, and technical skills. Tara is a strong believer in “Peopleware” and because of that has a keen understanding of building and managing engineering teams that deliver. Tara currently has the privilege of leading a team of engineers at Netflix where she has focused on continuously improving the sign-up and non-member experience to bring in the next 100 million Netflix members globally. Prior to joining Netflix, she lead engineering teams at Disney; if you’ve been to Disneyland or Disneyworld in the last decade, you’ve interacted with some of her teams’ software. She honed her engineering skills in the fast-paced, ever-changing environment at Amazon, learning lessons she still uses today. Outside of work, Tara loves to spend time with her family, cooking, and travelling. When not performing bedtime stories for her daughter, she is a passionate collector and player of board games and an aficionado of American bourbon.