Managing Distributed/Remote Teams Panel

Farhan Thawar is currently VP, Engineering at Shopify via the acquisition of Helpful.com where he was co-founder and CTO. Previously he was the CTO, Mobile at Pivotal and VP, Engineering at Pivotal Labs via the acquisition of Xtreme Labs. He is an avid writer and speaker and was named one of Toronto's 25 most powerful people. Prior to Xtreme, Farhan held senior technical positions at Achievers, Microsoft, Celestica, and Trilogy. Farhan completed his MBA in Financial Engineering at Rotman and Computer Science/EE at Waterloo. Farhan is also an advisor at Y Combinator and holds a board seat at Optiva (formerly Redknee).

Jan Chong is Vice President of Engineering at Tally, a financial automation company helping people navigate the complex world of consumer finance to save money, pay down their debt and reach their goals sooner. She leads and oversees the company’s client engineering, infrastructure security and technical operations teams.

Before joining Tally, Jan was a long-time executive at Twitter where she played a critical role in launching and scaling its core mobile and web products, overseeing a team of more than 300 people in Twitter’s consumer engineering organization.

Prior to that, Jan ran client and server development at OnLive, a cloud gaming platform. She received multiple degrees from Stanford University, including her Ph.D in management science and engineering, and M.S. and B.S in computer science.

Stephane is currently VP of Platform & Shared Services at InVision. An all-remote company. Currently responsible for modernizing and automating everything around the infrastructure and releases. Previously Stephane was at Tinder and launched Tinder Web, Sony PlayStation - joined at the launch of PS4, Apple Maps - built from scratch and launched to replace Google Maps, Goldman Sachs - Core Infrastructure Engineering. 

Rajiv Ayyangar is the founder of Tandem (tandem.chat), a virtual office for remote teams, backed by Y Combinator. Previously he was a data scientist at Aviate (acquired by Yahoo) and a program manager at Fairchild.

Amber was one of Stripe's early engineers, and worked on the first versions of many of their products. Over the last eight years, she helped the company scale over 200x, forming and leading the Product and Financial Infrastructure engineering orgs. Amber currently leads a few of Stripe's newest businesses, including the corporate card product (stripe.com/card) that launched last week.