Adopting AI as hands-on Engineering LeadersPractical AI in SDLC from discovery to production

Lindsey Simon is the VP of Engineering at Vercel. Making the Web faster has been his lifelong career ambition. Prior to Vercel, Lindsey spent seven years at Google, where he helped launch App Engine as an original core team member, and worked as a tech lead on the Google Translate and Web Performance teams. Lindsey has lived in San Francisco for the past 15 years, and his creative hobbies (beyond coding) include writing music and hunting for wild mushrooms.

Dünya Kırkalı is an engineering leader and software engineer whose journey spans building mobile apps, web services, data pipelines, and visualizations across diverse industries and teams. This breadth of experience shaped him into a true generalist, an asset when leading engineers from different disciplines. It also set him on the path to the field he fell in love with: engineering management. Left to his own devices, Dünya enjoys putting on a Joe Pass record and reflecting on ways to create tools and techniques to help engineering managers discover their own global maxima.

Kevin Ball is VP of engineering at Mento, focused on helping modern workers grow in their careers via a unique combination of coaching and mentorship. He is also a trained coach who works with engineers and engineering managers, a panelist on the JSParty podcast, and publishes Human Skills, a series of weekly interviews of tech industry leaders on all of the non-technical skills that go into success in the tech industry. Kevin is an experienced engineer, manager, and entrepreneur who has co-founded and acted as CTO for 2 companies, founded the San Diego Javascript Meetup, and has written articles for publications including Smashing Magazine, web designer magazine, Net magazine, and LeadDev. He has spoken around the world including conferences like All Things Open, Web Unleashed, NodeConf Colombia, and React Amsterdam.

Engineering Manager, Author of "You Belong in Tech"

Gregor is an engineering leader with 12+ years of experience in the engineering industry. In his career, he grew as an engineer to Senior Software Engineer and after to Lead roles (Team Lead to Engineering Manager to Head of Engineering to VP of Engineering to CTO). And now he is helping people and teams/companies to thrive with Fractional/Interim CTO roles, tech advising, coaching and mentoring. He is also writing one of the fastest growing newsletters for engineers and managers called Engineering Leadership newsletter.

Freddie Tibbles has spent two decades building web platforms at scale, from FTP go-lives to agentic deployment. A second-time founder (Techstars 2017), he has led award-winning teams across digital marketing, music tech, live sports betting and most recently e-commerce at Tesco, where he pioneered AI-native design systems. His "Design System as a Service" methodology serves 250+ teams across the retailer's digital estate. He has grown engineering teams from 1 to 100+. AI has made creating code cheap. Owning it costs what it always did. Freddie founded Modomics to measure that carrying cost, module by module, in the unit engineering actually spends: hours. The system closes the loop by directing agentic workflows scoped to the toil of keeping code alive, returning capacity to the roadmap.

Kanika Arora is a Software Development Manager at Amazon in London, where she leads an engineering team building the Retail Catalog Pipeline—the systems behind the product detail page for every item on Amazon. Over the past year, her team has integrated AI into their everyday engineering practices, building and shipping internal tooling that has since been adopted by a dozen other engineering teams across the organization. Before Amazon, Kanika worked at Meta on Instagram Shopping and Reels, and spent several years as a Computer Scientist at Adobe, where she built ML-powered features for Acrobat. She studied Computer Science at the University of Southern California. Outside of work, Kanika hosts Work, Life & Zen, a podcast exploring how to build calmer, more intentional careers. She is passionate about the intersection of technology, engineering leadership, and wellbeing—and about helping people do exceptional work without burning out.

Daria Stroganova is an Engineering Manager at Meta in London, with nearly two decades of experience in software engineering and engineering leadership. She has led engineering teams through periods of growth, complex product development, and evolving technical and organisational challenges. More recently, her work has focused on applying recent advances in AI and agentic approaches to ensuring the accessibility of Meta products. She is particularly interested in how AI is reshaping established roles in technology, coaching people as they navigate new career paths, and finding the right balance between the speed AI enables and the quality engineering organisations need to maintain.

Founder of Theodo, a tech consultancy he scaled with Benoît Charles-Lavauzelle from 10 to 700 people in 10 years. He worked on his first large legacy modernisation in 2008 and has been back in the trenches to experiment first-hand how AI is revolutionising this challenge. Fabrice has shared his Lean Tech and AI modernisation expertise at various conferences, including CraftConf, DevopsDays and Lean Summits.

Ilya Pukhalski is a founder and partner at ENDGAME. He spent 20+ years in software engineering, architecture and product development, designing and delivering large transformation programs for IKEA, Primark, Nike, Albert Heijn. He founded ENDGAME on a conviction: software engineering is in a renaissance, and machines amplify great engineering minds rather than replace them. At ENDGAME he builds a dark factory of autonomous agent pipelines, and helps other organizations make the same leap into agentic product development.

Matt is an independent TypeScript educator, building awesome self-paced courses at Total TypeScript.