Join the team behind Girl Geek X – Angie Chang, Sukrutha Bhadouria, and Gretchen DeKnikker – as they share their motivations for creating an event for mid-to-senior career level women, why it’s so important and where they are taking Girl Geek X next.

Cathy Polinsky (CTO, Stitch Fix) cut her teeth at companies like Salesforce, Yahoo!, Oracle and Amazon before blazing a trail into the public markets at Stitch Fix. Lucky for us, in this session Cathy shares what she’s learned along the way. Tune in for advice on hiring top talent while maintaining high EQ, managing down and – more importantly – up, and a ton of practical advice from the battlefield.

Arquay Harris (Director of Engineering, Slack) will cover advocacy and how to empower ownership of career trajectories on many levels. In this talk, she will share techniques on how to advocate for yourself, your team, AND how to teach your team to advocate for themselves.

Minji Wong (Founder, At Her Best) will share the tools you’ll need to grow in your career. The journey from individual contributor to a manager, to a manager of managers, is as much one of self-discovery as it is of learning new skills. Understanding your strengths and weaknesses as a leader requires introspection and a lot of radical candor – with yourself.

Kate McKinley (Security Partner, Facebook) will discuss how the mitigations we are using are not working, and that we have the technology of languages like Rust which offer a performance and compatibility in a memory-safe language. A large number of critical vulnerabilities reported by major operating systems and browsers are due to the legacy of the C programming language.

Nicole Grinstead (Senior Security Software Engineer, Netflix) will discuss anomaly detection project, Trainman, and how it enables Netflix to find and act upon high risk corporate user behavior. Threat detection has become increasingly valuable in today’s complicated corporate security landscape.

Julie Meloni (Director of Product Management & Strategy/Operations, USDS) shares her enthusiasm for work being doing for Veterans, immigrants, seniors, and everyone served by the government, and even better — how you can help! She shares opportunities for technologists who might want to do a tour of duty and make a difference in someone else’s life, every day. Created during the Obama administration and still working in the Trump administration, the US Digital Service is a full-stack team trying to build better technology and services in the federal government.

Samihah Azim (Product Designer, Lyft) will discuss designing products at One Medical and Lyft by considering all sides of the user journey, and balancing their needs with business/product metrics. Startups aim to transform the world, and designers create artifacts visualizing that North Star vision with the users at top of mind. Monitoring the health of the business with the user in mind helps achieve successful, human-centered products along the journey to the North Star.

Tune in!

Sophia Perl (Director of Product Manager, Oath)
stays current with new technologies and business models in the constant pursuit of knowledge, relevance and fun. The only constant is change and achieving career longevity means changing with it. Staying up-to-date with industry trends, new tools and emerging technologies can seem like a full-time job – but it doesn’t have to be.

Aline Lerner (CEO & co-founder, interviewing.io) analyzes feedback and outcomes of thousands of real interviews with companies to figure out what traits the best interviewers have in common. Being a good interviewer takes time, effort, and a fundamental willingness to get out of autopilot and engage meaningfully with the other person.

Nadia Fawaz (Staff Software Engineer, LinkedIn) will talk about how recommendation systems trained on biased data may reflect the bias — from reducing societal bias (e.g. professional gender gap) to reducing bias introduced by data collection or modeling, this work is crucial to successfully recommending dream jobs to hundreds of millions members worldwide at LinkedIn — to create economic opportunity for all.

Leah McGowen-Hare (Senior Director, Developer Evangelism, Salesforce) believes that doing the work with a focus on adding value – and everything will fall into place – rather than focusing on self-branding. Leah will share her story about how focusing on development, not just as coding but creating and using your whole toolbox, has made her a better developer and leader.

Selina Tobaccowala (Founder, Gixo/Evite), Sarah Allen (Founder, RailsBridge & Engineering Manager, Google) and Claire Vo (VP of Product Management, Optimizely) share their journeys in entrepreneurial leadership with Shanea King-Roberson (Senior Technical Product Manager, eBay). What’s life like after your startup is acquired by a larger company? How does your team integrate? How does your role as a leader change?

Miriam Aguirre (VP Engineering, Skillz), Laura Thomson (Senior Director of Engineering, Mozilla), Rija Javed (Senior Director of Engineering, Wealthfront) and Vidya Setlur (NLP Manager, Tableau Software) will share the ups and downs of their personal and professional journeys to top leaders in their organizations.

Jenny Cheng (VP, PayPal) in conversation with Gretchen DeKnikker (COO, Girl Geek X) as they share their management and leadership insights and takeaways from the day.