StaffPlus New York video hub
All the videos from our New York events
StaffPlus New York 2025 videos
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“Us vs. Them” thinking
Why us vs. them thinking arises, how to spot it, and how – and why – to bridge the divide.
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Scaling AI for high-stakes, real-time payments
What does it take to run real-time AI in Stripe’s core payment flow? This is the story of scaling ML in a latency-critical system used by billions and built by multiple engineering orgs.
Berlin • November 9 & 10, 2026
Laura Tacho (AWS), Bhavana Hindupur (Meta) & Liora Milbaum (Red Hat) confirmed 🎉
The festival for modern engineering leadership
London • June 2 & 3, 2026
Videos from previous years of StaffPlus New York
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Self-defense for change agents
In this session Amy will talk about her experiences as a change agent and what she learned about how to do it sustainably, even when the change ahead is drastic.
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When to know you’ve outgrown your monolith and what to do about it
This talk will dive into the most ambitious tech debt paydown project that was ever undertaken at Stripe.
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Reducing infrastructure cost during development and in production
Sally shares lessons learned from her experience at different companies to reduce costs from the product development stage to running a service in production.
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The joy of being staff+
In this session, Leslie Chapman will celebrate what it means to be a senior individual contributor. What better way to close out the conference than with a love letter to what brings us together?
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Unleashing the artist within: Mentoring strategies in software engineering
Rodney Cobb explores the concept of artistry in software engineering, discussing the benefits of unleashing creativity and innovation in our projects.
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From zero to “Brands that Matter” – improving scientific discovery during a pandemic
Vic Vijayakumar tells the story of building a world-class platform starting from zero, and how technical decision-making isn’t always glamorous.
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Leading in context
Patrick Shields explores why Staff+ roles are rarely simple or static, how to adapt your role when things change, and what it means to grow in your own unique path.
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Engineering without borders
Building a large scale project is never easy, but it becomes even more challenging when you’re working with a brand new team scattered across different time zones. Throw in a global pandemic, and you have a recipe for potential disaster.
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Do the hard stuff
Polina Giralt talks about how some of the most impactful technical work is about unwinding a humungous mess. This talk is about lessons learned over my career about executing challenging projects. The types of projects with politics, drama, tech debt, or past failed attempts. How do we know if the project is worth doing? Why has it failed before? Who’s blocking it? How do we know when to cut our losses and pause or cancel the project?
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Strategies for cloud migration
Constantinos Svendinoglou talks about the Data Group at Squarespace which has been on a transformational journey to migrate our systems to the cloud. At the beginning of 2022, we were running entirely on our own hardware; but by the end of 2023 we expect to be 100% cloud native. This talk will cover the strategy, tactics and execution that went into effect to make the migration to being cloud native over possible.
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Leading with vulnerability: A practical guide
Christina Chan shares her personal journey with vulnerability, as she learned to reframe her discomfort as opportunities for growth and eventually find the courage to be vulnerable.
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Building koi pond: simulating millions of slack clients
Join Maude Lemaire for a roller coaster ride of a story and a thrilling live demo of what Slack’s load testing systems can do!
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Say no to burnout and stand up for yourself
Krys Flores reminds us of how to keep yourself in focus while still delivering value. Krys also includes examples of how you can bring yourself back to a place of focus when you feel your organization is trying its best to have you do-all-the-things.
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How to complain positively
Josh Goldberg, a serial complainer with a catchy smile, will walk you through the steps he takes to make sure his complaining is heard and felt without causing pain.
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Building effective relationships
Mike McQuaid discusses the three types of relationships critical to cultivate: mentor, mentee and peer, how to decide which relationships to invest in vs move on from, how to use these relationships to improve your career, your success and work and build up everyone surrounding you and how to still do this when remote or timezone separated from your coworkers.
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Embedding on teams as a staff+ individual contributor
Shweta Bhandare shares her learnings with the process of embedding broken down into stages. For each stage, she will describe the focus areas, key relationships to build and nurture, outcomes to anticipate and finally how to unembed, making the team self-sufficient and self-confident in their ability to deliver.
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Leading without authority: an example from security engineering
In this talk we use the experience of a Security Engineer tasked with helping a development team raise their security posture, without being part of it. We will look at what works and what failed, propose tactic and techniques to best position the outsider in, and what observed results were achieved.
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How much should staff+ engineers code?
Joy Ertz discusses some of the pros and cons of continuing to code, along with how some of Joy and her peers have thought through and continue to think through this decision.
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Building a better bridge
Bryan Liles shares how he came to find out that he was a bridge builder and how that carried through his journey as a senior engineer to where he is today as a VP-level engineer in a public company.
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Solving inefficiency challenges at Datacenter scale
Bobby talks about how a technical solution increased the existing clusters capacity by 9% — resulting in a multi-year saving of 9-figures in CAPEX, by solving inefficiency challenges at datacenter scale.
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Moon to Mars: Planning and executing for the long term
Katie Sylor-Miller looks at how to ensure success when the end goal feels like it’s millions of miles away.
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Accessibility and why everything old is new again
Alice Li climbs into her Wayback Machine and delves into some foundational approaches and processes to facilitate and test for Accessibility compliance on the web.
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Driving clarity in ambiguous projects
Scott Triglia discusses his own approaches (those that have worked and some that haven’t) into a short set of advice.
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Getting to Commitment: Tackling broad technical problems in large organizations
Mattie Toia tackles five areas where you can build metaphorical muscles to help increase the likelihood that your initiatives are successful.