Meet fellow conference attendees with 1:1 SPEED NETWORKING for 7 minutes each session, with the option to extend the conversation.

Or, ease into a conversation without a time limit in the virtual SOCIAL LOUNGE – a place to meet like-minded attendees.

Having cut her teeth at an early-stage startup, Rashmi Channarayapattna (Vice President of Engineering, Salesforce) set out to build her career after taking a short career break. She will discuss how hard work, good luck, and asking for what you want can lead to successfully building credibility and differentiating yourself at work – leading to multiple promotions under different managers. Attendees will learn how to evolve your leadership style while navigating challenges.

We all have unconscious and implicit biases. In this session, Boomie Odumade (Senior Director of Engineering, Movement Infrastructure Group) will teach you to recognize bias in self and others. She will share real examples.

Attendees will leave with takeaways about reducing bias in all aspects of employment, from interviewing to the day to day.

Congratulations on your promotion to a Staff Engineer or welcome aboard if you just joined a new company in this pivotal role! Being a technical leader is a key milestone, but it comes with elevated expectations. Even if you’ve been the reliable go-to person for years, the new role demands more. What sets a Staff role apart from others? How can you get there, and once you’ve made it, what’s next?

Swathi Sundar (Head of Systems of Record Engineering, Benchling) will share her vantage point as an engineering leader who has seen and coached numerous senior/staff engineers reach their peak. She will share five pragmatic tips that can set you on the path to success!

Sowmya Subramanian (Product Manager, Development Seed) will be speaking about empowerment through strategy. She believes in the power of building community and connection, and will share pathways to success.

Dr. Shelby Heinecke (Senior AI Research Manager, Salesforce) will review how large language models (LLMs) work and what they can do. Then she will share a breakdown of LLM-powered agent, from the role of LLMs, memory, tools. Finally, she will share how to build agents and the latest research.

We’ve heard of career ladders and jungle gyms. Now, imagine your career challenges as a series of experiments with unexpected outcomes.

Margaret Wang Johnston (Engineering Group Director) will share her story and career takeaways as she transformed her career while learning to view unknown as experiments. She will share how to fail forward and tackle new challenges at work.

Drawing parallels from the famous saying, “If you want to go fast, go alone; but if you want to go far, go together”, we believe that it is imperative to empower our customers to be active contributors rather than passive recipients, as it is through the collective efforts of more people learning how to identify, raise and address concerns that we can resolve and develop ethical and responsible AI for everyone.

Daniela Steinsapir (Senior Manager, Experience Architecture, Autodesk) will share insights and learnings about customer trust and concerns regarding enterprise data sharing, intellectual infringement, and future of creativity. She highlights the positive impact of customer participation and our experience of collaboration with an AI ethicist and their key role in fostering a thought-provoking experience. Attendees will learn her tips and tricks for designing and executing this hands-on research exercise, which creates conditions for designing with customers instead of for customers.

Find your tribe, you are not alone!

Eirini Syka Lerioti (Senior Developer Relations Program Manager, ASML) believes you should always have a plan. She will share how to think outside of the box (e.g. who is in your current network? what’s the value you get from your connections?) and how to be part of something bigger (e.g. communities, networks, associations).

Manali Rane (Product Line Manager, Nokia) is SD-WAN and Security Product Line Manager at Nokia. She’ll delve into the current security landscape, emphasizing the importance of integrating security within the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). She will discuss how early detection and fixing of vulnerabilities can be achieved through this integration and will share essential tools for secure coding, security testing and tackling security threats. She will also discuss and review Vulnerability Management processes through examples and share the challenges organizations face in Threat and Vulnerability Management, proposing AI-driven solutions. Plus, she’ll shed light on exciting trends in network security, highlighting the vast career opportunities in network and cybersecurity.

Sweta Sinha (Executive Director, Data Products Platform, JP Morgan Chase) will be speaking about her journey from software engineer to executive director of data products platform at JP Morgan Chase.

Data privacy is a human right. When Privacy data is mishandled it creates a ripple effect where the harms are not obvious or immediate on those impacted.

Christina Liu (Senior Security Engineer, Cisco) believes that we as software engineers and members of the tech industry should be doing our utmost to protect data privacy. In her talk, she will cover the current challenges to securing personally identifiable information, including challenges from AI, and provide practical tips on how to protect it.

You won’t want to miss this hands-on engineering manager’s talk on successfully leading the Data Engineering team through multiple technology migrations and deliverables. She is passionate about building productivity tools to aid her team with mundane work.

Nataliya Nadtoka (Manager, Data Operations, Basis Technologies) shares her takeaways for mastering the unknown and shares her strategies for planning excellence. She also will talk about the balancing act of guiding multi-year migrations and CI/CD transformations. She believes in the acronym “NAP”, which stands for Navigate, Adapt, Progress – sharing her tips for overcoming technical challenges, conflicts, and building strategic partnerships.

With the goal of empowering participants, don’t miss this comprehensive understanding of what constitutes a successful technical interview and how to navigate the multifaceted aspects of the evaluation process.

Vandana Sharma (Solution Architect, Flexton) will reveal her holistic evaluation approach to technical interviewing. She will share how to understand the importance of evaluating technical skills across various dimensions, including algorithms, coding, system design, and domain-specific knowledge. She will combine practical application of knowledge and industry-relevant expertise, highlighting various resources and tools for technical interview preparation.

Employers will share more about a company’s culture, values, and mission, as well as the opportunities for growth and development within the organization. Learn about how the company grows employees professionally, any initiatives or projects that the company is working on, more about the roles and teams hiring, and the interview process!

Learn about their job opportunities! Meet recruiters, staff & more at the discussion tables in the virtual Employer Booths (12pm-1pm Pacific Time / 3pm-4pm Eastern Time).

ELEVATE’s partner companies are actively hiring for many roles, from featured jobs to a variety of roles across the company. Let them know you’re interested during BOOTH HOUR!

This former civil engineer pivoted to become a senior product manager in just 3 years.

Shannon Cassidy will share her four approaches to breaking into product management from an unrelated field. She will teach attendees how to leverage your experience to gain credibility with a new network, and share her tips to get your resume through the application portal and in the hands of a hiring manager.

Explore the endless possibilities that come with having your own custom Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) model, from enhancing productivity to fostering creativity and innovation within your organization.

Dimitra Charalampopoulou (Machine Learning Engineer, Intel) will share how to familiarize yourself with GPT technology. Attendees will discover how to customize your GPT model to suit specific use cases and domains, such as generating content for marketing, customer service, or educational purposes.

Curiosity killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.

Ashleigh Lee (Cybersecurity Product Marketer) will share her unique journey in cybersecurity. She challenges three assumptions she had entering the industry:

• the only way to be a “real” practitioner in cyber is to be a hacker in a hoodie
• the only way to make progress is to become super technical
• technology can solve everything

Pratibha Rathore (Tech Lead, Applied Research Scientist, Meta) will speak about generative AI, natural language understanding, computer vision, optimization, and simulation to develop innovative AI systems for various sectors, including legal, trust and safety, and adversarial detection. She works closely with diverse teams to ensure AI solutions meet quality standards, perform well, and align with business goals and user requirements. Her contributions include detecting platform threats, enhancing content moderation accuracy and efficiency, and optimizing enterprise operation workflows.

Starting her career in technical support, transitioning into marketing roles and then finally to technical customer facing activities, Rosie has worn many hats in the Technical Sales Organization over the last decade

Rosie Sennett (Staff Solutions Engineer, Splunk) has made the transition from back office to front and back… and has lots to share. She will teach attendees how to learn what is expected of you, learn what is expected of your customer, and learn what your customer will of you.

Vidhya Arvind (Staff Software Engineer, Netflix) will speak about key-value store data model for building abstraction, and adapting to the changing data shape. She will teach attendees how to modify the strategies when access pattern changes.

Jessie Heng (Senior Engineering Manager, Snowflake) will speak about performance reviews and how you can stand out. She will cover what happens in performance calibration, what can you do to stand out during calibration, what can you to do prepare your manager.

Shubhi Asthana (Senior Research Software Engineer, IBM) will speak about identifying personal identifiable information (PII) in large language models (LLM)s. She will be speaking about protecting PII with on LLMs, sharing how OneShield has created a guardrail solution for privacy concerns. She will discuss PII taxonomy, categories, use cases, and more.

Do you feel queasy when you have to self-promote?

Lade Tawak (UX Researcher) will share why self promotion is important and introduce her 3-part framework for how to promote your work in a way that feels authentic to you. Attendees will receive practical tips for building visibility in the workplace.

Chisom Nwokwu (Software Engineer & Author, Microsoft) will speak about what DataOps is – and why it is important. She will dive into DataOps principles (e.g. collaboration, automation, continuous integration) and how solving data management challenges (e.g. slow deployment, inconsistent data quality) can lead to automating workflows and ensuring continuous improvement. She believes we can achieving cross-functional collaboration with DataOps, illustrating the importance of fostering collaboration between data teams.

Shradha Doshi (Senior Manager, Product Owner, Comcast Business) will share how negative connotations around introversion inhibit from taking actions to career growth. She will help attendees heal negative outlook toward being introverted, revealing how they can be leveraged. She will share how introverts can self advocate with confidence and alignment.

Stop by the FLUID virtual lounge in for another fun way to mingle with fellow attendees.