In her talk, Solmaz Shahalizadeh shares tech independent principles for scaling AI that can be implemented in any organization, and any domain. Walking the audience through her own journey, Solmaz will illustrate how these principles enabled Shopify to go from implementing one successful model, to now having over 100 models in production across all aspects of the business.

Broken data is costly, time-consuming, and nowadays, an all-too-common reality for even the most advanced data teams. In this talk, I’ll introduce this problem, called “data downtime” — periods of time when data is partial, erroneous, missing or otherwise inaccurate — and discuss how to eliminate it in your data ecosystem with end-to-end data observability. Drawing corollaries to application observability in software engineering, data observability is a critical component of the modern DataOps workflow and the key to ensuring data trust at scale. I’ll share why data observability matters when it comes to building a better data quality strategy and highlight tactics you can use to address it today.

In this fireside chat, Sri Shivananda and Joel Beasley cover some of the principles and frameworks that have made the greatest impact on Sri’s career as an engineering leader. They’ll cover Sri’s approach to organizational transformation, Sri’s COWS method to pick the right technology, build vs. buy, areas to look for when you’re building a pipeline of leadership, and recognition and disruption of patterns through self-reflection.

In this fireside chat, Bill Coughran and Melody Meckfessel discuss different dynamics to help your engineering org become a strategic advantage to your company. They’ll cover how to leverage feature/system “simplicity,”how to weigh when you should bring insights into your product usage, when to strategically bring in SREs, and how to balance tech debt and refactor work.

In the fast-paced world of startups, building a solid team is a key component to building a great product. However, experience has shown that there’s more to it than just “hiring the best people”. In this session, we will share practices learned from building startups and dive into pragmatic processes that you can implement in your organization.

After CoderPad acquired CodinGame late last year, the company has been working through a countless number of challenges as they're moving from a 5 people team to a 100+ team worldwide in 3 years. In this session, Loïck Michard extracted key takeaways they've learned merging two engineering teams that span people, process, product and planning for you to consider acquisition as a really efficient growth and diversity lever.

This session with Jiani Zhang and Patrick Gallagher will cover some of the emerging trends and critical areas of focus for both startup and established engineering orgs. You’ll learn about how to overcome challenges with recruiting senior engineers, build resilience against uncertainty and churn, and leverage mentoring programs to bridge the gap between junior and senior engineers!

We’re all looking for ways to improve engineering productivity - so what’s the secret behind great teams? This session with Cyrus Radfar and Ali Irturk unpack some of the invisible elements of culture that can cause dramatic increases in engineering productivity. They’ll cover how to increase ownership and empathy, what creates the right environment driving great documentation, and how to align incentives to help you release faster and with higher quality!