Speakers

Randy Shoup is a 30 year Silicon Valley veteran, currently serving as SVP Engineering at CircleCI. He has also been VP Engineering and Chief Architect at eBay, VP Engineering at Stitch Fix, and a Director of Engineering at Google Cloud. He talks a lot, sometimes at conferences about engineering leadership. He is particularly interested in the nexus of technology, culture, and organization.

Suzanne established and leads the Technology function at SIRO, the joint venture between Vodafone Ireland and ESB delivering full fibre broadband to Irish homes and businesses over the electricity network. She is responsible for network selection, design and rollout, IT systems deployment and operations, and in-home installation for SIRO’s retail and enterprise customers. Suzanne began her career as a process engineer in pharmaceuticals and has 25 years’ experience in technology and engineering, largely with Vodafone Group Technology across European markets. She is a member of the FTTH Council Europe Board and serves on the boards of Vodafone Group Services Ireland Limited and An Garda Síochána (Irish police force).

Niilo Säämänen is the CTO at Wolt, where he leads the teams building world-class products and technology that power millions of orders every day across 30+ countries. Over the past ten years, he’s helped grow Wolt’s engineering organization from just 10 people to 800+, scaling not only the tech but also the culture that keeps it fast, focused, and fun. Niilo is passionate about building well crafted products that truly scale, and about giving teams the trust and autonomy to make it happen.

Dawn Baker is a senior engineering leader passionate about developing individuals, teams, and organizations. As CTO at Back Market, she leads global teams in powering an ecommerce platform that drives the circular economy. With experience leading a wide range of technology teams in diverse organizations, Dawn has a track record of transforming engineering culture to accelerate growth. She currently lives and works in Paris.

Lee is the CTO of Flagstone, the UK’s leading cash deposit platform. He loves solving complex problems, ranging from 3D-printed hardware for healthcare, to redesigning the UK’s online passport platform and driving innovation in the finance sector. Loves dogs, bourbon and fideua. Also holds the controversial opinion that The Office US is better than The Office UK.

Steve Martin is Vice President of Product Engineering at Monzo, one of the UK’s largest digital banks with more than 15 million customers. Before Monzo, he was an Engineering Director at Apple responsible for Siri’s conversational platform, speech, and natural language understanding. At Google, Steve’s teams built YouTube Music, YouTube for Artists, and Google Play Games. His extensive engineering leadership background also includes leading teams at Amazon.com and Riot Games. Steve holds a MS in Computer Science from UC Berkeley, and a BS in Computer Engineering from the University of Washington.

Melinda Seckington is a consultant, trainer and coach, working with engineering teams and leaders to improve their communication, management and collaboration skills. She previously was an engineering manager at companies such as the Wikimedia Foundation and FutureLearn, where she focused on creating great internal engineering cultures. She’s an international conference speaker and has spoken at over 50 conferences, covering topics from good management practices to becoming a better speaker.

Technology strategist and transformation leader with 30 years of experience delivering large-scale IT programmes across EMEA. Specialising in technology strategy, interim technology leadership, and platform engineering, they help organisations align technology with business goals to accelerate delivery and drive sustainable growth.Their expertise spans AI adoption, DevOps culture, developer productivity, and change management, with a proven track record of leading engineering organisations and platform teams through modernisation and complex transformation. Combining executive perspective with hands-on experience, they define clear roadmaps, build business alignment, and deliver measurable results.As Chief Developer Advisor at Microsoft, they partner with CTOs and technology leaders to improve engineering effectiveness and help organisations succeed through pragmatic technology leadership.

A-Dos is the former CTO of Cookbook at HelloFresh, where he led engineering teams building high-performing cultures and delivering product outcomes at scale. A practitioner of AI-driven leadership, he believes the most effective engineering leaders today combine deep people instincts with intelligent, AI-augmented systems, from how teams are run to how decisions are made. Based in Berlin, A-Dos is passionate about helping engineering managers grow into strategic leaders, and is on his own journey to do the same.

Evelyn van Kelle is a change management consultant working in technical environments, where she helps organizations design and sustain sociotechnical systems. With her experience, she focuses on how human behavior and social dynamics shape the way technology is built and adopted. Evelyn is a strategic thinker who values curiosity and questions over quick answers. She supports organizations in navigating change and creating environments where desired behaviors can thrive. She is also the co-author of Collaborative Software Design (Manning Publications).

Paul is CTO of Digital Solutions at Vention DACH, with over two decades in technology spanning founder, full-stack engineer, and executive roles. He launched his first literature platform while still in school and published his first novel in early 2025. At Vention, Paul leads technology strategy and architectural decision-making across the DACH region. He’s also the voice behind the podcast “Product and Cake,” where he explores product development, leadership, and complexity – bringing both technical depth and a natural gift for conversation to the panel.

Lars Richter serves as VP Software Engineering at Univention, bringing a career that spans .NET development, native iOS engineering, and several years of progressive leadership — from team lead through Head of Engineering to VP. He never quite stopped being an engineer. These days that curiosity goes into exploring where AI can genuinely improve the way teams build software.

Joel Chippindale is a CTO Coach who supports talented engineering leaders to make the most of their skills, knowledge, and experiences. He supports them to develop their capabilities so that they can grow their companies. He has coached over 100 senior engineering leaders. He also has 20 years of experience building, scaling, and leading software development teams, mainly in start-ups, including CTO and COO roles. In these roles, he has demonstrated outstanding leadership to deliver effectively and efficiently and also clear communication to build strong, trusting relationships with leadership teams, customers, and boards.

Michelle McDaid is the founder of The Leading Place, a leadership consultancy helping organisations build high-performing, people-first cultures. With more than 25 years in technology leadership, including as Senior Director of Engineering at Workhuman, she has led global teams, scaled organisations, and guided complex change.Michelle combines practical leadership experience with evidence-based research, holding an MSc (Hons) in Work & Organisational Behaviour from DCU, where she studied trust in remote and hybrid teams. A qualified executive coach, she advises organisations on leadership, culture, communication, and organisational change, with a focus on trust, psychological safety, and inclusive leadership.A passionate advocate for women in technology, Michelle mentors through Growth Guild EU/UK, serves on the board of North Dublin Citizens Information Service, and is a regular conference speaker.

Simon helps enterprises harness AI to transform software delivery at scale, aligning strategy and delivery for faster, smarter outcomes. With experience across product, UX, delivery, and platform strategy, he focuses on reducing strategic debt, scaling portfolios, and building adaptable, AI-ready cultures. A regular international speaker, he promotes a pragmatic, ethical approach to AI that cuts through hype and delivers lasting value

Tom Howlett is Director of AI Engineering Engagement at Sonar, leveraging over 30 years at the forefront of Software Development Practices. Starting as a developer in ‘90’s .com startups in London and NYC, he transitioned to guiding companies in adopting agile software engineering practices with a strong focus on quality. This commitment eventually brought him to Sonar, where he led Product Management before moving to AI Engineering Engagement. He now focuses on how developers can build an efficient Agent Centric Development Cycle without compromising on quality.

Vilhelm von Ehrenheim is Co-founder and Chief AI Officer at QA.tech, an AI-native end-to-end testing and verification platform based in Stockholm. QA.tech crawls web and mobile applications to build a behavioral knowledge graph, then uses autonomous agents to verify changes on every PR without scripted tests.Before QA.tech, Vilhelm spent five years building the Motherbrain AI platform at EQT, one of the earliest production deployments of machine learning in venture capital. Prior to EQT, he led the Predictive Modeling team at Klarna, building real-time credit and fraud risk models in a decision pipeline processing around 300,000 transactions per day. His applied research has been published at EMNLP, KDD, and CIKM, and he holds an MSc in Engineering Physics from Lund University.

Irina Pushkina is a CTO and technology leader working across scaling SaaS, platform modernisation, and engineering leadership.Most recently CTO of a multi-tenant SaaS platform serving more than one million users across Europe, leading platform modernisation and engineering scaling under growth pressure.Earlier, she held technology leadership roles at Schuberg Philis on mission-critical systems for regulated enterprise clients. Her background spans SaaS, industrial software, semiconductor systems, simulation platforms, and high-performance computing — across organisations ranging from R&D-driven product companies to large-scale operational environments.

Hywel is the CTO-turned-Founder at Skiller Whale. He wrote his first program in C aged 9. After graduating with an MEng from Cambridge, he dropped out of his PhD programme to co-found his first start-up. Today, Hywel is Skiller Whale’s Co-Founder, he runs a dinner club for CTOs, a podcast for tech leaders called ‘Primarily Context-Based’, and is designing and building his own 8-bit computer for playing Pong. In his 15+ tech leadership career, he’s been building and scaling start-ups. With Skiller Whale, he is drawing on that experience to solve the biggest problem he faced as a CTO: learning for engineering teams.

Carol helps senior technology leaders strengthen executive visibility, strategic influence, and positioning for C-level success. Drawing on her background in psychology, executive coaching, and leadership consulting, she works with tech executives to communicate with impact, build influence across stakeholders, and accelerate career growth.

Mackenzie is the Field CTO for Aikido Security, helping tech leaders understand application security through an attacker’s lens. As the co-founder and former CTO health tech company Conpago, he understands the challenges of building secure applications. He has spoken in over 30 countries, hosts the popular Podcast “The Secure Disclosure,” and contributes to multiple publications including Dark Reading, Financial Times, and Fast Company.

Guthrie Cooper leads product for the AI Innovation and Incubation domain at Just Eat Takeaway, where he is building the next generation of on-demand commerce – spanning agentic AI, autonomous robotics delivery, and consumer platform partnerships. With a career spanning startups, scale-ups and multinationals, he was an early product leader at Over, the mobile design platform acquired by GoDaddy for $100m in 2020. Based in Amsterdam, Guthrie brings a hands-on operator’s perspective to the intersection of AI, product strategy and large-scale execution. At CTO Craft Con he will share what it takes to incubate and ship genuinely novel products inside a global organisation.

Jessica has extensive experience and expertise within cloud architecture, cloud infrastructure and platform engineering. She’s a hands-on technical leader who has built up and led platform teams within developer experience and data. She is also a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) ambassador who regularly shares her knowledge both in the local Gothenburg community and at conferences.

As Software Architect Enabler at DHL eCommerce, Kenny (Baas) Schwegler helps teams design sustainable and resilient software architecture rooted in the belief that ‘every voice shapes the software’. He combines domain-driven design with Team Topologies to facilitate clearer communication between stakeholders and software creators, using collaborative modelling and deep democracy to decode complexity, resolve conflict, and keep software agile to business demands.He is also a Team Topologies Valued Practitioner (TTVP) and runs his independent training and facilitation practice, Weave IT. Kenny co-authored Collaborative Software Design: How to Facilitate Domain Modeling Decisions and organises the Virtual Domain-Driven Design community to share these ideas more widely.