What we’re about
***[IMPORTANT] ***
SFELC has migrated from Meetup to its own website (https://sfelc.com/). Please register on the website instead of here. All future events will be announced there. Through the website, you can see videos and photos of past events, as well as other resources, such as book lists, etc.
ABOUT US
SFELC is a curated community of engineering leaders with 2000+ leaders from over 800 companies. Although we started in San Francisco, we are here to serve all engineering leaders.
OUR MISSION
To connect world's engineering leaders and help evolve the way leadership is implemented in the tech industry.
OUR BELIEFS
• Most problems we face have been solved by others in the community. What's missing is the connection.
• Everyone (even the least experienced) has learnings valuable to others.
• Our challenges are often nuanced and context-dependent, so having dialogs is critical.
RESOURCES
• YouTube channel for some of our past events: http://bit.ly/2ySKaRD ;
• Slides from our past speakers: http://bit.ly/2JZetrj ;
• Photos from recent events: http://bit.ly/2wh9kch
PAST SPEAKERS
• Tim Correia, SVP and General Manager @ Trulia
• Jason Fennell, Former SVP of Engineering @ Yelp
• Samantha Stoller, Sr. Staff Engineer @ Slack
• Kimber Lockhart, CTO @ One Medical Group
• Tomas Barreto, VP, Product & Engineering @ Checkr
• Deep Varma, VP of Engineering @ Trulia
• Dan Portillo, Former Talent Partner @ Greylock
• Wade Chambers, CTO & SVP of Engineering @ Grand Rounds
• Li Fan, Head of Engineering @ Lime
• Andy Fang, Co-founder & CTO @ DoorDash
• Jerry Krikheli, VP of Engineering @ Houzz
• Adam Wolff, VP of Engineering @ Robinhood
• Jean Hsu, Co-Founder @ Co Leadership
• Ming Hua, Engineering Director @ Facebook
• Jessica McKellar, Founder & CTO @ Pilot
• Erika Reinhardt, Engineering Manager @ Stripe
• Joanne Pons, VP of Engineering @ MyVest
• Allen Cheung, Senior Director of Engineering @ Affirm
• Rolf Jensen, SVP Engineering @ Tradeshift
• Maria Latushkin, SVP Engineering @ Omada Health
• Souvik Das, SVP Engineering @ Zenefits
• Dan Pupius, Co-Founder & CEO @ Range Labs
• Lei Yang, VP & Head of Engineering, Quora
• Jocelyn Goldfein, Managing Director @ Zetta Venture Partners
• Raylene Yung, Head of Payments, Stripe
• Mike Riccio, Director of Engineering, Google
• Krishna Bhagavan, GM, Alexa Reminders, Amazon
• Michael White, Head of Engineering, Caviar, Square
• Jason Warner, SVP of Technology, GitHub
• Dave Camp, VP of Engineering, Firefox at Mozilla
• Wade Foster, CEO & Co-founder @ Zapier
• Dana Lawson (moderator), VP of Engineering @ InVision
• Tim Olshansky, CTO @ Aconex
• John Thimsen, VP of Engineering @ Qualtrics
• Edward Kim, Co-founder & CTO @ Gusto
• Andy Chen, Partner @ Kleiner Perkins
• Naveen Gavini, Head of Product Engineering @ Pinterest
• David Silverman, former Navy SEALs Officer, Author of "Team of Teams", Founder & CEO @ CrossLead
• James Birchler, VP of Engineering @ SmugMug
• Wade Chambers, CTO & SVP of Engineering @ Grand Rounds
• Daniel Portillo, Talent Partner @ Greylock
• Scott Shumaker, VP of Engineering @ Credit Karma
• Jessica McKellar, Founder & CTO @ Pilot
• Soren Harner, VP of Engineering @ Mulesoft
• Nik Koblov, VP of Engineering @ Affirm
• Adrian McDermott, President of Products @ Zendesk
• Soren Abildgaard, Senior VP of Engineering @ Zendesk
• Mark Rabkin, VP of Engineering @ Facebook
• Deborah Liu, VP of Product, Marketplace @ Facebook
• Rob Mee, CEO @ Pivotal
• Steve Herrod, Managing Director @ General Catalyst, Former CTO & SVP of R&D @ VMware
• Jason Warner, SVP Technology @ GitHub
• Raylene Yung, Senior Engineering Leader @ Stripe
• Joe Binney, VP of Engineering @ Robinhood
• Lee Edwards, CTO @ Teespring
• Bill Portelli, Managing Partner @ CEO Quest, Co-founder and former CEO @ CollabNet
• Nick Caldwell, VP of Engineering @ Reddit
• Tim Correia, VP of Engineering & Product @ Zillow Group
• Wade Chambers, VP of Engineering @ Twitter
• Ron Lichty, Author of Manage the Unmanageable
• Simon Perryman, Director of Engineering @ Twitch
• Matt Greenberg, Sr. Director of Engineering @ Credit Karma
• Dan Pupius, former Head of Engineering @ Medium
OUR SPONSOR:
We are proudly partnering with Greylock Partners as our sponsor, who has been helping us tremendously since our early days.
From Greylock Partners:
"Greylock Partners backs entrepreneurs who are building disruptive, market-transforming consumer and enterprise software companies. We invest early in companies that define new markets, including Airbnb, AppDynamics, Arista Networks (NYSE: ANET), Cloudera (NYSE: CLDR), Docker, Dropbox, Facebook (Nasdaq: FB), LinkedIn (NYSE: LNKD), Medium, Nextdoor, Okta (NASDAQ: OKTA), Palo Alto Networks (NYSE: PANW), Pandora (NYSE: P), Pure Storage (NYSE: PSTG, Redfin (NASDAQ: RDFN) and Workday (NYSE: WDAY)."
Upcoming events
3
•OnlineVirtual Roundtable: Redefining Good Software in the Age of Agentic Coding
OnlineWe'd love you to join us - please click here (our new platform) to register！
For most of our careers, “good software” has been defined under a very specific constraint:
writing and changing code was expensive.
In the last few years, and especially in the last six months with tools like Claude Code and Codex CLI, that constraint is breaking.
We suddenly live in a world where creating large amounts of new code is cheap and fast.
That means some of our old intuitions about “good” and “bad” code might not hold anymore. If code is abundant, then what is scarce now? What should we actually be optimizing for?
We’ll explore:
- How should we redefine “good software” when code is easy but understanding might still be hard?
- What are the new best practices in this world?
- And what are the anti-patterns we’re already starting to see with agentic coding workflows?
Expect a fast, candid conversation about how engineering judgment needs to evolve as AI becomes a core contributor to software creation.
Host: Ben Segal, Senior Director of Engineering @ Swift Navigation
Ben leads the engineering team behind the Skylark Cloud GNSS Correction Service—a global, real-time platform enabling precise positioning for autonomous systems, mobile devices, and geospatial applications. He brings deep experience building and scaling cloud services, real-time data systems, and ML-powered platforms, and holds multiple patents in advanced positioning technologies. An entrepreneurial builder at the intersection of deep tech and software, Ben has guided multiple products from concept to launch.
We'd love you to join us - please click here (our new platform) to register！2 attendees
•OnlineMatch & Learn - Building a Culture of Continuous LLM Experimentation
OnlineWe'd love you to join us - please click here (our new platform) to register！
Large Language Models are reshaping how we build products, systems, and teams. But success with LLMs isn’t just about the technology — it’s about creating a culture that encourages curiosity, iteration, and learning at scale.
In these 1:1 conversations, we’ll explore:
- From ideas to impact: How do you turn LLM experiments into real organizational value?
- Lowering barriers to experimentation: How can teams safely test, learn, and iterate without friction?
- Balancing rigor and speed: How do you maintain quality and governance while encouraging bold exploration?
- Cultural foundations: What leadership behaviors and rituals help sustain an experimentation mindset?
How it works:
- In the course of the session, you'll be matched with other engineering leaders for a 10-minute video call
- At the end of 10 minutes, you'll have the option to extend it or start another match.
Join if you:
- Are leading or supporting LLM-driven initiatives in your org
- Want to exchange real-world lessons on building a culture of experimentation
- Believe that innovation thrives on curiosity and continuous learning
- Appreciate thoughtful, serendipitous conversation with peers
This is a space for reflection, learning, and connection among leaders building the future of AI together.
We'd love you to join us - please click here (our new platform) to register！1 attendee
•OnlineVirtual Roundtable: Building Production-Grade AI Agents for Enterprise SaaS
OnlineWe'd love you to join us - please click here (our new platform) to register！
Building production-grade agents for enterprise AI SaaS requires more than stitching LLM calls together.
Join a small-group conversation on the engineering patterns that actually make agents production-grade — predictable, debuggable, grounded, and economically viable.
We’ll dig into:
- Architectures + guardrails that hold under real workloads
- Grounding, evaluation, and tool-orchestration choices
- How to decide between fine-tuning and RAG for enterprise reliability
- Designing for SaaS realities: latency budgets, compliance, unit economics
Host: Preeti Shukla, CTP O @ Whimbli
20-year enterprise SaaS and AI engineering leader. Deep experience building secure, compliant, multi-tenant platforms and AI-driven systems (LLMs, RAG, agentic workflows, MLOps). Author of AI SaaS x Product Engineering and Forbes/Gartner engineering thought leader.
We'd love you to join us - please click here (our new platform) to register！1 attendee
Past events
68
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