In today's fast-paced tech landscape, the role of Staff+ engineers is more crucial than ever, extending beyond technical excellence to encompass strategic vision and influential leadership. As the bridge between engineering teams and executive management, Staff+ engineers have the unique opportunity to drive innovation, steer technical direction, and shape the future of their organizations. Reaching the Staff+ level is a significant achievement, but truly thriving and amplifying your impact hinges on developing and exercising your strategic thinking skills to solve complex business problems.
In this keynote, I will unveil my comprehensive framework for developing strategic thinking at any career stage, with a special focus on Staff+ engineers. Drawing from my experience of hiring, mentoring and partnering with several staff and dozens of staff+ engineers at industry leading companies as well as startups with successful exits, this session will deliver actionable insights and real-world examples to empower you to elevate your strategic influence within your organization. Whether you're an experienced Staff+ engineer or an aspiring one, join us to gain the tools and perspectives needed to navigate the next horizon of your engineering career.
Key Topics to be Covered:
- Strategic Thinking Framework: Learn how to cultivate strategic thinking whether you're aspiring to become a Staff+ engineer or looking to excel in your current role.
- Real-World Examples: Discover success stories and lessons learned from Staff+ engineers at industry leaders like Netflix, Google, AWS, and innovative startups.
- Balancing Innovation and Risk: Learn how to pursue cutting-edge technologies while maintaining a pragmatic approach to risk management, ensuring stability and reliability.
- Influencing Organizational Culture: Understand how to shape and influence the culture of your organization to support innovation, collaboration, and strategic thinking.
- Leadership's Role: Understand how leadership can play a crucial part in nurturing and strengthening strategic thinking within your team and organization.
- Actionable Insights: Equip yourself with practical strategies you can immediately apply to your role and organization to drive impactful results.
Let’s chart the course for your strategic evolution together!
Speaker
Shweta Saraf
Director of Platform Networking @Netflix, Board Member for eBPF Foundation
Shweta is the Director of Platform Networking at Netflix and leads the teams that power the largest streaming network on the earth. Her teams are responsible for building various components of the network, like the cloud gateway, the cloud networking stack, network as service platform and service mesh.
Prior to Netflix, Shweta was Head of Network Modernization at Equinix. In her role, she transformed one of the largest network’s on the planet by driving efforts around network disaggregation, network efficiency and network intelligence with focus on open source. She previously scaled the Edge Infrastructure teams that built the Equinix Metal - baremetal cloud offering and Network Edge - network NFV offering at Equinix. She has also held leadership roles at Packet, DigitalOcean and Cisco.Shweta also serves on the board of eBPF Foundation which is part of Linux Foundation.
Shweta is passionate about making space for all the voices in tech and has worked (for the last decade) to advance women and other minorities in tech. Shweta mentors many leaders in tech and also co-host of Traceroute podcast for the upcoming season. Shweta is 40 under 40 honoree for 2022, recognized by Silicon Valley Business Journal for her contributions to tech and community.She was also recognized by YWCA of Silicon Valley as Emerging leader back in 2008. She lives in the Bay Area with her husband, son and a fur baby.
Slides are not available