Devasena Rajamohan is Corporate Vice President of Dynamics 365 Customer Experience Applications at Microsoft, leading global teams of product managers, engineers, and data scientists driving innovation across Customer Insights, Sales, Customer Service, and Copilot. With a career spanning over two decades in enterprise CRM and cloud software—including senior leadership at SAP and early engineering roles at TATA Infotech—she has shaped how large organizations deliver AI-powered customer engagement. Under her leadership, Microsoft earned recognition as a Leader in both the 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant for CRM Customer Engagement Center and The Forrester Wave Customer Service Solutions Q1 2026.
Prachi Gupta is VP of Engineering at Google, leading the Workspace Communication & Time Management portfolio - Gmail, Chat, Calendar, and Tasks - for hundreds of millions of users worldwide. A graduate of IIT Roorkee and Ohio State University, she spent over eight years as VP of Engineering at YouTube before moving to Workspace, where she now sits at the intersection of Google's AI transformation and its most-used productivity tools. Her current mandate: turning Gmail into a Gemini-powered personal proactive assistant.
Benjamin Encz is the CEO and Co-Founder of Ashby, a San Francisco-based AI-native recruiting platform used by companies like OpenAI, Shopify, and Snowflake. A German-born software engineer turned recruiting-infrastructure builder, he spent 80% of his time on recruiting operations as Director of Engineering at PlanGrid before co-founding Ashby in 2018. Under his leadership, Ashby has grown to 2,700+ customers, ~$28M ARR, 380 employees, and $142.5M in total funding including a $50M Series D in 2025.
Gil Feig is the Co-Founder and CTO of Merge, the unified API platform that lets B2B software companies add hundreds of integrations to their products in days instead of months. He started coding at 12, got a cease-and-desist from Facebook at 16, and launched Merge in the middle of COVID after interviewing 100 companies before writing a single line of code. The company has raised $74.5M, serves 4,000+ customers, and named Feig and co-founder Shensi Ding to the 2023 Forbes 30 Under 30 list.
Jonathan Perichon is the Co-founder and CTO of Checkr, Inc., a San Francisco-based AI-powered background screening platform he co-founded in 2014 with Daniel Yanisse. A French-born software engineer who discovered the gig economy's broken background check infrastructure while working at an LA startup, Perichon turned that frustration into a $4.6 billion company serving over 100,000 clients including DoorDash, Lyft, Coinbase, and Uber. A Y Combinator S14 alumnus who applied three times before getting in, he embodies the principle that persistence and execution beat credentials every time.
Piyush Rajput is the Co-Founder and SVP of Engineering at Simpplr, the AI-powered employee experience platform he helped build from the ground up in 2014. A civil engineering graduate from IIT Delhi, he pivoted to software and has spent 15+ years at the intersection of engineering and product - now overseeing the technology behind a platform serving 2 million+ employees at companies like Moderna, Penske, and the NHS. Simpplr has raised $139M+ in total funding and reached a Series D under his technical leadership.
Bryan Gobbett is the Chief Executive Officer of RackWare, a San Jose-based multi-cloud mobility and resiliency platform that has migrated over one million workloads across 60+ countries. With nearly two decades of engineering leadership at companies including Cisco, Ericsson, Dell, and Gigamon, Gobbett brings deep technical credibility to a company quietly becoming essential infrastructure for enterprises navigating hybrid and multi-cloud complexity. Under his leadership, RackWare grew revenue 74.5% to $10.5M ARR in 2024 and secured preferred license partnerships with Oracle, IBM, and Google Cloud.
Søren Abildgaard is the CEO of KeyShot, the industry-leading 3D visualization and rendering platform used by designers, engineers, and marketers worldwide. A Danish-born engineer-turned-executive, he brings two decades of engineering leadership from Zendesk, Avaya, Contentful, Adobe, Autodesk, and Microsoft to his mission of transforming KeyShot from a photorealistic rendering tool into a full-lifecycle visualization and realization platform. Having served on KeyShot's board since 2023, he stepped into the CEO role on May 1, 2025, backed by GRO Capital, with a sharp focus on AI integration, customer proximity, and strategic clarity.
Jean-Denis Greze is the Co-Founder and CEO of Town, an AI-powered tax platform for small businesses that raised an $18M seed round led by First Round Capital in March 2025. Previously, he served as CTO of Plaid, where he scaled the engineering team from 20 to 350 people, and before that as Director of Engineering at Dropbox. A Columbia CS grad and Harvard Law JD, he brings an unusually cross-disciplinary approach to building technology companies at the intersection of finance, law, and software.
Belsasar 'Bel' Lepe is co-founder and CEO of Cerby, the identity automation platform built to secure the applications that traditional identity tools ignore - the sprawling layer of disconnected, nonstandard, and unmanageable apps that enterprises actually run on. A first-generation Mexican-American and Stanford Computer Science graduate, Lepe started at Google at 18, then co-founded Ooyala - a video technology company that achieved two exits totaling over $440M - before turning his attention to the gaping hole in enterprise identity security. Cerby raised $54M in Series B funding in 2025, counts L'Oréal, Fox, and Allstate among its customers, and has grown ARR 10x in under two years.
Tomas Barreto is an Operating Partner for Engineering at Kleiner Perkins, one of Silicon Valley's most storied venture firms. He was the 5th engineer and 14th employee at Box, where he scaled engineering through IPO and past $500M in revenue, eventually leading 150+ person teams as VP of Engineering. He later joined Checkr as its first VP of Engineering, then co-founded Okay - an engineering analytics startup backed by Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins that was acquired by Stripe in 2023. Now at Kleiner Perkins, he advises 20+ portfolio companies on building and scaling world-class engineering organizations, drawing on two decades of experience that spans IBM, Microsoft, Box, Checkr, and his own startup.
Armita Peymandoust is Senior Vice President of Engineering, AI Cloud at Salesforce, where she leads development of Einstein AI and Agentforce - Salesforce's next-generation autonomous AI agent platform. A Stanford-trained electrical engineer with a PhD, she built her career from Intel chip design through Yahoo's ad algorithms to becoming one of the most influential voices in enterprise AI. A self-described mom, optimist, and immigrant, she champions the idea that AI should be accessible to everyone - not just engineers.
Sireesh Bodireddygari is Executive Vice President of Software Engineering at Salesforce, where he leads a global team of 1,000+ engineers building Tableau and CRM Analytics products. Promoted to EVP in March 2025 after nearly a decade of rising through Salesforce's analytics engineering ranks, he is the engineering force behind Tableau Next — an AI-native, full-stack agentic analytics platform unveiled at Tableau Conference 2025. A 25-year software veteran who started at L&T Infotech and cut his teeth at Yahoo! and DIRECTV before joining Salesforce as Director of Wave Analytics, he has become one of the most consequential engineering leaders in enterprise data and AI.
Louie Bacaj is an Albanian-American software engineer turned entrepreneur who climbed from immigrant poverty in the Bronx to Senior Director of Engineering at Walmart, then walked away from it all in 2021 to build a portfolio of small bets. He co-founded the Small Bets learning community with Daniel Vassallo, runs the M&Ms Newsletter on Substack with 9,000+ subscribers, and teaches engineers how to level up their careers and build income outside the 9-to-5. His philosophy: make money with bits, diversify into atoms.
Luca Rossi is an Italian software engineer, entrepreneur, and writer based in Rome who turned a side project into one of the world's most-read engineering leadership newsletters. After co-founding and scaling travel startup Wanderio to 25M+ customers over eight years, he launched Refactoring in 2020 - a newsletter covering engineering management, software teams, and tech leadership. It now reaches 172,000+ subscribers, ranks in the top 10 Substack business newsletters, and generates approximately $300K/year in revenue, all operated solo. He also hosts the Refactoring Podcast, featuring guests like DHH, Kent Beck, and Camille Fournier, and in 2025 released Tolaria, a free open-source macOS knowledge base app built entirely with AI coding tools.
Nicola Ballotta is an Italian engineering leader with 25+ years of internet industry experience, currently serving as Director of Cloud at Namecheap where he built EasyWP — one of the world's most affordable managed WordPress hosting platforms — from prototype to production. He is best known as the creator of The Hybrid Hacker, a newsletter that grew from zero to 30,000 subscribers in 18 months before being acquired by Refactoring in June 2024. The combined publication now reaches 120,000+ readers and serves a 900+ member private community of engineering leaders.
Addy Osmani is an Irish software engineer and engineering leader who spent nearly 14 years shaping the modern web at Google Chrome - leading the teams behind Lighthouse, Core Web Vitals, Chrome DevTools, Puppeteer, and PageSpeed Insights. Now Director at Google Cloud AI, he bridges Gemini, Vertex AI, and the Agent Development Kit for millions of developers worldwide. Author of multiple O'Reilly books and curator of the Elevate newsletter, Osmani's work has touched over 20 million developers and his open-source projects have become industry standards.
Irina Stanescu is an engineering leadership coach, content creator, and former Tech Lead Manager at Google and Uber who turned a severe burnout episode into a mission. She founded The Caring Techie newsletter, now with 61,000+ subscribers, which challenges the tech industry's overwork culture and champions empathy, wellbeing, and influence as learnable leadership skills. Originally from Bucharest, Romania and based in San Francisco, she coaches engineers at companies like Anthropic, Google, and Meta, runs the highly-rated 'Impact through Influence' course on Maven, and speaks at major conferences including Craft Conference and LeadDev Berlin.
Jacob Kaplan-Moss is one of the co-creators of Django, the Python web framework that powers Instagram, Pinterest, and thousands of other sites worldwide. After 25+ years building and leading software teams - from a Kansas newspaper where Django was born, to Heroku's security org, to 18F's government tech unit - he walked away from the tech industry in 2024, training as an EMT and volunteering with search and rescue. He remains a board member of the Django Software Foundation, publishes the 'jacobian' newsletter on engineering craft, and is known for his influential writing on hiring, documentation, and the 'programming talent myth'.
Sarah Drasner is a Senior Director of Engineering at Google, where she leads the Core Developer Web Infrastructure powering Search, YouTube, Gmail, and Workspace. A rare hybrid of fine artist turned technologist, she spent 15+ years shaping how the web moves - as a Vue.js core team member, staff writer at CSS-Tricks, creator of the Night Owl VS Code theme (used by millions), and author of both 'SVG Animations' (O'Reilly) and 'Engineering Management for the Rest of Us'. Before Google, she was VP of Developer Experience at Netlify and a Principal Lead at Microsoft Azure. She is an award-winning speaker, teacher on Frontend Masters, and co-organizer of ConcatenateConf, a free conference for Nigerian and Kenyan developers.
Will Larson is a veteran engineering executive, author of four books on engineering leadership, and the voice behind the long-running newsletter Irrational Exuberance. He has scaled engineering teams at Digg, Uber, Stripe, Calm, and Carta, and currently serves as CTO at Imprint. His books - An Elegant Puzzle, Staff Engineer, The Engineering Executive's Primer, and Crafting Engineering Strategy - have sold tens of thousands of copies and are considered essential reading in the engineering leadership community.