Track Overview
Building Great Engineering Cultures & Organizations
Whether you’re in a startup trying to create the conditions for technolgy innovation and scalable growth, or a mature ‘corporate’ trying to establish the environment that sustains digital transformation, it is arguably ‘culture’ that trumps all in the pursuit of success. Technology has never been more ‘throwaway’ (the tools we use replenishing now annually), while the business graveyards are full of those that led with ‘process improvement’ alone. In this track we’ll hear from the practitioners representing digital leaders of the Consumer Internet as well as transformational corporates from ‘traditional’ sectors to understand how they establish and scale engineering cultures that keep their organisations ahead of the rest (spoiler alert: it’s nothing to do with pizzas, beanbags or foosball).
From this track
An Engineering-Led Culture at Scale
This talk presents Sky Betting and Gaming’s journey from establishment of a core ‘engineering-driven’ people and culture model, to replication throughout the UK team and now internationally across the group. How to create a learning environment, and encouraging meaningful growth by...
Amanda Bellwood
People Operations Manager @skybet
Building a Culture of Continuous Improvement
Avvo created tools to encourage data-driven thinking, autonomy and a spirit of continuous improvement. This talk describes those tools, their implementation and the issues and challenges encountered when doing large-scale culture change in a ten-year-old company. Continuous improvement is the...
Kevin Goldsmith
CTO @Avvo, former Spotify, Adobe, Microsoft
It's People, Stupid (People Are Stupid?)
Andy’s proposition is that the reason things fail is usually people, not technology. Human beings are operating a 'broken machine'. There is a way forward, however: learning how to get more deterministic outcomes with meat puppets is a worthwhile investment of time- especially to understand the...
Andrew Walker
Founder at Kraken Industries
Engineering Culture Revived
Waves of technology innovations are sweeping through all industries now, and software development teams are finding themselves on the receiving end of exponential demands: cloud, big data, machine learning, voice- activated, IoT, yada yada! For many organisations, the fear of being left behind...
Finbarr Joy
Senior Technology Adviser @Superbet
Building and Growing Sustainable Teams
Globalsign is one of the organisations at the heart of the internet identity / security maelstrom- tackling cloud, IoT and the provision of millions of digital identities; As such they’ve had to move quickly in establishing their next generation platform, coordinating engineering efforts across...
Vlad Galu
VP Engineering @GlobalSign
Building Great Engineering Cultures Panel
This panel session will create a unique opportunity to hear from some of the foremost practitioners of Engineering leadership. The group will discuss topics relating to the challenges of engineering culture development, but also take questions from the floor to provide guidance to those who are...
Andrew Walker
Founder at Kraken Industries
Vlad Galu
VP Engineering @GlobalSign
Finbarr Joy
Senior Technology Adviser @Superbet
Sally Goble
Senior Engineering Manager @Deliveroo
Tom Clark
Head of Common Platform @ITV
Amanda Bellwood
People Operations Manager @skybet
Speakers from this track
Amanda Bellwood
People Operations Manager @skybet
Amanda has worked at the intersection of 'HR’ and engineering team management for over 10 years, helping organisations such as William Hill adopt engineering-driven people management to achieve scale and agility. At Sky Betting and Gaming, Amanda has been involved in the creation of an...
Read more
Kevin Goldsmith
CTO @Avvo, former Spotify, Adobe, Microsoft
Kevin Goldsmith is the Chief Techniology Officer at Avvo in Seattle, overseeing all Research and Development, Data Engineering, Dev Ops and IT teams. Previously he was the Vice President of Engineering, Consumer at Spotify in Stockholm, Sweden, where he led both the product development and...
Read moreFind Kevin Goldsmith at:
Andrew Walker
Founder at Kraken Industries
Andy Walker has been doing software engineering for nearly 30 years. He is currently the founder of Kraken Industries and was previously at Google, Skyscanner, Netscape, Sony, IBM and various startups you'll never have heard of. For the last 10 years he's been fascinated by...
Read moreFind Andrew Walker at:
Finbarr Joy
Senior Technology Adviser @Superbet
Finbarr is Senior Technology Adviser for Superbet, a new entrant into the online gaming industry. With over 20 years’ leadership experience of technology ‘at the leading edge’, Finbarr is dedicated to developing breakthrough business models, powered by tech. His prior roles have...
Read more
Vlad Galu
VP Engineering @GlobalSign
Vlad is a seasoned technologist rooted in secure and scalable network, systems and software engineering, with a track record of 17 years in delivering carrier grade content delivery, internet security and satellite communications systems. Since joining GlobalSign in 2014 he has set up the...
Read moreFind Vlad Galu at:
Sally Goble
Senior Engineering Manager @Deliveroo
Sally has been working in software development for more than ten years. She is currently a senior engineering manager at Deliveroo, working on helping solve many of the problems that occur when rapidly scaling an organisation. Over the past year this has included creating a comprehensive...
Read moreFind Sally Goble at:
Tom Clark
Head of Common Platform @ITV
Tom's spent 16 years working with technology across a number of sectors, from manufacturing with Jaguar Cars to media with the BBC, Global Radio and now ITV. During this time he's held senior positions in several disciplines, including engineering, development and architecture. As Head of Common...
Read moreFind Tom Clark at:
Track Host
Finbarr Joy
Senior Technology Adviser @Superbet
Finbarr is Senior Technology Adviser for Superbet, a new entrant into the online gaming industry. With over 20 years’ leadership experience of technology ‘at the leading edge’, Finbarr is dedicated to developing breakthrough business models, powered by tech. His prior roles have...
Read more