Career Development in Tech: Building Diverse and Inclusive Teams

It is our great pleasure to invite you to an evening of networking and panel discussions on career development in tech. What does diversity and inclusion mean? What are the initiatives we could take to alleviate the current disparity. This event is targeted at mid-career level professionals who are seeking to get to the next level of their career.

The agenda is as follows:

18:00 Welcome to Spotify (Mingling, snacks and drinks)
19:00 – 19:30 D&I initiatives
19:30 – 20:30 Panel discussion: Career steps, how to climb up the ladder
20:30 – 21:00 Q&A

Panelists include experienced professionals in the technology sector, with both scientific and engineering backgrounds. Confirmed panelists include:

• Ioana Balas, Engineering Manager @ Improbable

Ioana is Engineering Manager of the Workflows team within the Games Business Unit, which comprises the sequences and automated patterns for local development, as well as for shipping changes to code into the Cloud. She is driven by the sense of accomplishment achieved when seeing a team delivering successfully and aim to enable and further grow the team through techniques such as teaching, mentoring and coaching, focusing on both individual and team needs.

• Merve Aygin, Pre-Sales Solutions Engineer @ GoCardless

Merve worked as a computer programmer for 7 years after finishing her BSc Degree in Computer Science in 2004. Moved into Solutions Engineering in 2011 and have been developing herself in this area since then. Enjoys working with prospective customers on the technology side and the thrill of sales whilst working with various teams being mainly Sales, Partnerships, Product Marketing, and Product. She is currently working as Solutions Engineering Manager at GoCardless.

• Mounia Lalmas-Roelleke, Research Director @ Spotify

Mounia is currently a Research Director at Spotify. She use to be a Director of Research at Yahoo London. She also holds an Honorary Professorship at University College London. Her work has focused on studying user engagement in areas such as native advertising, digital media, social media, and search, and across devices.

• Muge Ersoy, Engineering Manager @ Spotify

Muge is currently Engineering Manager at Spotify. She loves to code and being helpful to people in various ways. She is very passionate about creating diverse and inclusive environment around her. She enjoys solving big or small scale problems.

• Vasiliki Simaiaki, Team Lead Data Scientist @ Hudl

Vasiliki is a Team Lead Data Scientist at Hudl, a leading sports analytics company that has raised over $100million in funding. She leads a team of data scientists and her role involves coaching and career progression planning. Her career focus has been in computer vision and automated machine learning. Prior to working in Hudl, she has gained a broad perspective from working in academic research, industry and technology startups. As she is often the only woman in the room, she is passionate about encouraging women follow a tech career.

See you there!