StaffPlus New York 2025
2025-10-15..2025-10-16
New York, NY, United States
[StaffPlus New York 2022, StaffPlus New York 2024, StaffPlus New York 2025]
who it's for
staff engineers, principal engineers, distinguished engineers, engineering managers, technical architects, platform engineers, developer experience engineers
topics
context engineering for LLMs; AI-accelerated migrations; real-time payments ML scaling; server-driven UI experiments; architectural concerns backlog; compiler-driven developer experience; mentoring to distinguished engineer; site reliability at scale (search); requirements engineering for product; crisis leadership and incident tactics
| title | author | length |
|---|---|---|
| Mind the gap: Navigating the staff+ performance cliff | Katie Sylor-Miller | 27m |
Claim: a sharp Performance Cliff appears when engineers move to Staff+ because prior habits and metrics stop working. Concrete tactics: map stakeholders, run… | ||
| The lean architect: Experimenting your way to better decisions | Maxime Najim | 28m |
Argues for hypothesis-driven architecture: run small experiments, not big upfront design. Uses a server-driven UI proof of concept as a concrete case, builds… | ||
| AI won’t fix developer productivity (unless you fix context first) | Peter Werry | 23m |
Claims that concrete improvements happen once teams engineer context not just code generation: a context engineering layer ties GitHub Slack Jira Confluence… | ||
| Lessons from the other side: What your VP is actually thinking | Kelly Moran | 25m |
Argues that engineers must trade ground-truth for context with their VP and gives concrete payoffs: a 100‑person org reshuffles quarterly, ICs usually get ~30… | ||
| How to lead when you just don't know the tech | Lorena Salamanca | 26m |
An in-house customer text box is deployed to collect missing-item requests and is integrated with a PIM; the project requires reversed data flow into the PIM… | ||
| Coherent impact: The art of strategy | Hazel Weakly | 25m |
Claim of concrete wins: wrote the company hiring budget in one quarter, grew a platform org from eight people into five teams in two quarters, rebuilt the… | ||
| Anti-Misalignment: Nobody knows what “alignment” is | Richard Kim | 25m |
Argues that alignment is actually group flow not a meeting and shows a simple model with three ingredients that make misalignment visceral: discovery… | ||
| AI-accelerated migrations at scale | Charles Covey-Brandt | 14m |
Airbnb reports a concrete migration playbook: a custom AI migration framework, idempotent validate-transform loop run concurrently (concurrency up to 100), and… | ||
| Scaling AI for high-stakes, real-time payments | Prasad Wangikar | 25m |
Stripe processes $1.4 trillion in 2024 and scales real‑time ML by building a Kron‑based feature store called Shepherd (two years to build), moving heavy… | ||
| Guiding mentees on the path to distinguished engineering | Todd Outten | 26m |
Distinguished Engineer candidacy requires specific evidence: technical breakthroughs like zero trust network microsegmentation, measurable impact on revenue or… | ||
| Un-becoming the bottleneck | Alex Poulos | 11m |
Claims a concrete win: a bespoke data engineering diagnostic tool gets built and deployed to let team members diagnose ad-delivery problems themselves, and it… | ||
| Leading a team through 0-1 product development | Jen Lamere | 09m |
Advocates building a quick end to end prototype that hits 75% not 100% and uses hard-coded integration points to get feedback fast then splitting work so one… | ||
| You can big bang! | Travis Thieman | 27m |
Argues that full rewrites succeed for manageable, data‑driven services when backed by concrete plans: replace Scheme with JavaScript (V8) and Python with Go… | ||
| “Us vs. Them” thinking | Leaf Jessica Roy | 11m |
A shared‑services group of a team of six staff+ serving 15–20 teams inherits a behind‑schedule project with senior management involved and an operations team… | ||
| Are we arguing or are we architecting? | Daniel Bykat | 10m |
Argues that arguing is useful and reframes conflict as clarification, names three concrete blockers—misaligned incentives, the parking lot that buries issues… | ||
| Scaling systems, scaling influence: Lessons from distributed architecture | Mallika Rao | 11m |
Argues that distributed-systems principles map to leadership and shows concrete tools: design protocols and service contracts, create fault tolerance via… | ||
| Building Figma Draw | Lauren Budorick | 22m |
Built and launched Figma Draw at Config May 2025 by a scrappy core of 4–6 permanent ICs plus temporary contributors and 2–4 embedded rendering engineers, using… | ||
| The magic of crisis | Carla Geisser | 22m |
Claims crisis is a rare window to force technical change: if three of five symptoms appear (fundamental surprise, broken core function, high visibility… | ||
| The altitude slider: Knowing when to dive into code vs. drive the strategy | Curtis Allen | 13m |
Claims a simple altitude slider helps senior ICs switch between architecture and hands‑on work, with concrete rituals: morning/weekend altitude checks, project… | ||
| Requirements [Citation needed] | Tali Gutman | 12m |
A team builds blackbox monitoring and a status page that ships GA ten days ago and discovers requirements were guesses not facts: a drafted exactly-once… | ||
| Scaling LinkedIn’s search infrastructure | Rahul Raja | 26m |
LinkedIn replaces legacy S E + Galene verticals with a managed hosted search platform that centralizes index builds, live updates and serving, cuts per-team… | ||
| Compiler makeover: How tech debt created happier developers | Sameera Jayasoma | 13m |
WSO2 reframes long-standing compiler debt as opportunity and rebuilds the Ballerina compiler and VSCode plugin into a real-time compiler architecture that… | ||
| Build bravely: Delivering risky projects | Akshay Shah | 12m |
Ambitious projects get saved by concrete specs and executable checks not vague examples The session shows how RFC 2119 requirement language combines with… | ||
| The silent infrastructure crisis | Chris Buckley | 13m |
Fastly’s Q2 2025 analysis claims visibility into 6.5 trillion monthly requests, finds AI bots comprise ~50% of traffic (Imper), and shows fetcher spikes up to… | ||
| Engineering excellence: New product development in medical devices | Anshu Bhatt | 24m |
Seven years of product work lead from concept to FDA release of a NextGen SPECT/CT scanner at Siemens Healthineers with concrete choices and results: a team… | ||
| Reimagining the image pipeline at Squarespace | Wenshuo Liu, Arnaud Lawson | 30m |
Squarespace replaces upload-time resizing with on-demand image processing in the origin, converting and resizing images to WEBP (and serving fallbacks) so… | ||
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