Differing Pathways to Leadership
Leadership in engineering is not one-size-fits-all. This panel discussion will explore the diverse pathways to leadership, from excelling as an individual contributor to navigating the complexities of management roles, and taking on strategic positions like Chief of Staff.
Our amazing panelists—Diane Tang from Google, Jane Chiu from Coda, and Avital Arora from Google—will share their personal experiences, offering a deep dive into the unique challenges and opportunities that each path presents.
Through their stories, the audience will gain valuable insights into the decisions and strategies that have shaped these leaders’ careers. Whether you’re considering staying on the IC track, moving into management, or exploring alternative leadership roles, this session will provide you with practical advice and inspiration to forge your own leadership journey.
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Diane TangFELLOW GOOGLEDiane Tang is a Google Fellow currently leading a team dedicated to empowering decision makers with robust data, tools, and insights around our users and product ecosystem. Prior to 2017, she worked in Google Life Sciences on building data infrastructure and analytics for biological & medical applications. Before that, she was a leader on the Ads Quality team at Google. Since joining Google in 2003, Diane has focused on logging, large-scale data analysis & infrastructure, experiment methodology and ads systems. She earned a bachelor's degree in Computer Science from Harvard in 1995 and a master's degree and PhD in Computer Science from Stanford in 2001. She is the co-author of “Trustworthy Online Controlled Experiments: A Practical Guide to A/B Testing” as well as numerous other publications in mobile networking, information visualization, experiment methodology, data infrastructure, and data mining / large data and holds many patents. |
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Jane ChiuCHIEF OF STAFF CODA
Jane is the Engineering Chief of Staff at Coda. She is an empathetic and seasoned leader with over 15 years of experience in technical program management; spanning across corporate, start-up, health, and nonprofit sectors. She has extensive expertise in influencing without authority, strategy, and operations.
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Avital AroraDIRECTOR ENGINEERING GOOGLE
Avital Arora is Sr. Director of Engineering at Google, leading Compute Storage and Solutions. Prior to Google, Avital has 20+ years of experience leading Engineering teams in various stages at companies such as Salesforce, NetApp and Dell as well as a seed stage startup. She has been on both sides of acquisition integration and has led teams delivering products from scratch, cloud migrations as well as engineering stack integrations. She prides herself in building and empowering stellar teams.
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