Speakers

Experienced CTO who has led and scaled technology organisations that build & run brilliant products and services, in a range of sectors including medtech, fintech, government, ecommerce, telco and manufacturing.

Accustomed to high-pressure, business critical environments, usually requiring 24/7×365 operations, and delivering excellent services and optimising costs simultaneously.

Excels at scaling up teams, transforming processes and organisations to go from good to great. Passionate about technology and building smart multi-functional teams and organisations to develop brilliant products.

Published author and international speaker. Regularly trains the Be a Brilliant People Developer workshop to level up technologists into excellent managers & coaches.

As CTO, CPO, and Board Member at Marley Spoon, Nasreen Abdul Jaleel brings strategy, product, and technology together to drive growth. Her remit spans the global D2C customer experience, ERP and logistics systems serving the USA, Australia, and Europe, plus data, cloud infrastructure, and IT. She’s led customer-focused product and engineering groups that deliver measurable impact, scaling digital experiences across web, mobile, and data platforms, running technology transformations for teams of 1,000 and more, and closing M&A deals along with the high-stakes integration work that follows.

Nasreen’s career began in academia, building machine learning algorithms for information retrieval and cross-language search, work that led to four publications and a patent. That grounding in applied research still shapes how she approaches complex problems, with curiosity, rigor, and a belief in data-driven insight. Today she’s exploring how technology can broaden equitable access to the world’s resources, and how inclusive, aligned leadership can turn that into real impact.

David Santoro is the CTO and Co-Founder of carwow.com, the FT1000 2018 6th fastest growing startup in Europe. He has been programming for over 20 years and making a living from it for over 16 years. He is a programmer at heart but more interested in creating successful businesses/products using technology rather than playing with cool tech.

Dr. Ilknur Colak is the CTO at Schneider Electric, where she leads innovation and digital transformation initiatives. With over 20 years of experience in engineering, technology development, and strategic leadership, she specializes in integrating cutting-edge solutions to enhance energy efficiency and sustainability. Dr. Colak also spearheads innovation in medium-voltage power electronics converters for data centers, EV charging, and other critical applications. She holds a PhD in Electrical Engineering and has contributed to numerous patents, publications, and industry standards. A passionate advocate for diversity and inclusion in the workplace, she promotes equitable opportunities and inclusive cultures. Beyond her professional achievements, Dr. Colak is a high-altitude mountaineer and Seven Summits climber, exemplifying resilience and determination. Known for her forward-thinking approach, she inspires innovation and sustainability in the energy management and automation sectors worldwide.

Eirik Pettersen has been Chief Technology Officer at Secret Escapes Ltd since 2017. Previously, Eirik was a co-founder at Moonfruit, a design-led consumer website builder software-as-a-service that launched in 1999 and sold to Hibu (formerly Yell) PLC in 2012. He has also held the role of CTO of Gandi.net (domain name registrar) and sits on the board of KwizIQ (AI language learning platform) and is angel investor in Beat Fitness Games.
Eirik studied Physics at Imperial College and received his PhD from Cambridge University (Queens’).

Sathya Nandakumar is the Chief Technology Officer at Holland & Barrett with a remit to lead the tech transformation of the business, taking them from a well-known 150- year-old retailer to a global health and wellness business with tech and data at the heart of everything they do. With over two decades of experience driving strategic digital transformation and fostering innovation within complex organisational landscapes, Sathya has a proven track record of building scalable, future-ready digital solutions and empowering high-performing engineering teams. Her expertise spans omni-channel strategy, multi-channel transformation, and the strategic leveraging of both in-house capabilities and external partnerships to deliver significant business value.

Her leadership philosophy emphasises a human-centred approach, focusing on nurturing talent and creating environments where continuous improvement and empowerment thrive. This commitment to people and purpose was notably recognised when she was a finalist for the Tech Transformation Lead of the Year by the Women in IT Awards in 2018, and nominated twice in 2024 and 2025 for the SheCanCode Female CTO of the year.

Matej Pfajfar is the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Monzo, the UK’s largest digital bank with more than 13m customers. Before joining Monzo, Matej was an Engineering Director at Google from 2018, where he led engineering teams on Android. Prior to that, Matej was the Executive Director of Adacta, where he worked for nearly 16 years and led the development of one of the top rated core systems for insurance. Matej holds a Computer Science degree from the University of Cambridge.

Ravneet Shah started her professional journey as a Systems Engineer in the telecommunications sector, subsequently ascending through various roles including Software Engineer and Senior Software Engineer.

Her extensive experience spans esteemed data and financial institutions where she had hands-on experience working on modern technology.

Shortly after the inception of Allica Bank in early 2020, Ravneet joined the organization as Lead Backend Engineer. Demonstrating rapid professional growth, she was promoted within 18 months to the strategic role of Vice President of Engineering’a position created to leverage her unique skills and leadership.

In February 2022, Ravneet’s continued excellence and visionary leadership in technology culminated in her promotion to Chief Technology Officer.

Filip Denker is the CTO and co-founder of Yoto, the interactive audio platform that lets kids play and learn without a screen. He started the company in 2017 with Ben Drury, building it around Montessori principles and a straightforward idea: put children safely in control of what they listen to.

Yoto’s first player launched on Kickstarter, sold out, and was followed by a second-generation player in early 2020 and the portable Yoto Mini a year later. The platform now reaches families across the UK, Europe and the US, and it’s earned awards and praise from critics, parents and children. Its catalogue pairs award-winning original content with audio licensed or co-created with partners including Penguin Random House, Disney, LEGO, the Roald Dahl Story Company, HarperCollins and Scholastic.

Julien spent five years at ZOE, from 2019 to 2025, stepping into the CTO role in 2023 and helping scale the company from zero to over $100M ARR. There he built distributed systems serving millions of users and helped establish ZOE as one of the UK’s most impactful scale-ups, through work including the Covid Symptom Study and its nutrition research.

A CTO with deep experience scaling teams and products through hypergrowth, Julien has built engineering teams from the ground up, co-developed product strategy, and put developer experience at the center of how those teams innovate and ship. He operates at every level, from the codebase to the C-suite, connecting technical execution to strategic goals. His expertise spans high-scalability systems, distributed architectures, and advanced data processing, with a strong focus on security and close collaboration with data science and machine learning teams, delivering everything from web and mobile apps used by millions to internal platforms that drive commercial success.

Outside of building products, Julien is a mentor, advisor, and speaker who enjoys sharing what he’s learned and helping others grow.

Milena is an engineer by background and a platform builder by instinct. She spent over a decade at Google, growing from new-grad software engineer to Senior Engineering Director across Search, infrastructure, Android, and Google Play, before serving as CTO at Trainline for four years. Today she’s Founder and CEO of Heywa Labs.

Milena cares deeply about making powerful systems usable, intuitive, and genuinely delightful, working from the belief that the future of AI won’t be defined by models alone but by how people experience them. That’s the thinking behind Heywa Labs: building fast, thinking long term, and always keen to connect with the builders, designers, researchers, and investors shaping what comes next.

Ross is the CEO and Founder of Wordsmith AI a legal AI platform. After training as a lawyer in Edinburgh, Ross moved into tech, selling his first startup to Skyscanner, which became their business-travel product which he led. In 2017, Skyscanner was acquired by CTrip for $1.7 billion, at the time the 4th largest technology exit in UK history. He went on to spend 5 years as CPO and then CPTO at TravelPerk, helping scale the business from $1M to $170m ARR in less than 5 years, making it one of Europe’s most successful SaaS unicorns.