Top 18 Tech Leadership Speakers to Book in 2026

Werner Vogels is vice president and CTO of Amazon, where he drives its technology vision. A former distributed-systems researcher, he has helped shape Amazon's approach to cloud computing.

Vogels writes and speaks extensively about distributed architectures, cloud infrastructure, resilience, AI, and technology trends. He turns lessons from leading global operations into useful advice for people building and managing large technology companies.

Lara Hogan is the founder of Wherewithall, a leadership coach, and an author. She previously led engineering teams at Kickstarter and Etsy, where she helped new leaders grow.

Through her workshops and coaching, Hogan teaches leaders how to give feedback, set clear expectations, mentor others, and guide teams through change. Her experience gives technology leaders practical tools for managing people as companies grow.

Kelsey Hightower is a software engineer, developer advocate, and speaker. He's known for making cloud-native technologies accessible through live demos, teaching, and work across Kubernetes and open source.

Before retiring from Google, Hightower was a Distinguished Engineer working on Google Cloud. His talks became known for making infrastructure concepts understandable without losing their technical depth, pairing hands-on expertise with lessons about careers, community, and leadership.

Fiona Tan is chief technology officer at Wayfair, leading its global technology organization. Earlier, she held senior engineering leadership roles at Walmart, Ariba, and TIBCO Software.

Tan oversees technology behind Wayfair's e-commerce experiences and brings leadership experience spanning consumer, supplier, associate, and commerce platforms. Her career shows how senior technology leaders connect engineering execution, platform strategy, and customer experience at scale.

Bryan Cantrill is co-founder and CTO of Oxide Computer Company. He is also a systems engineer and longtime technology leader known for work on DTrace, operating systems, infrastructure, and developer tooling.

Cantrill has spent his career building core technology systems, from DTrace at Sun to infrastructure at Joyent and Oxide. In his talks, he explains complex engineering ideas while also discussing workplace culture, system design, and how teams build reliable technology.

Michelle Brush is an Engineering Director for Site Reliability Engineering at Google. She leads global SRE teams responsible for the reliability of Compute Engine and Persistent Disk services.

With experience spanning embedded software, distributed systems, data platforms, and consumer devices, Brush brings a broad engineering perspective to reliability leadership. Her talks and writing explore SRE practice, complex systems, risk, and the challenges of keeping critical infrastructure dependable.

Anjuan Simmons is a technology leader, author, and speaker whose work include engineering leadership, agile management, burnout, psychological safety, and inclusion in technical organizations.

Simmons uses technology talks to examine the human side of engineering, including distributed-team management, burnout, privilege, and leadership lessons drawn from history and agile practice. That range makes his speaking especially relevant to leaders balancing technical delivery with healthy organizations.

Elizabeth Stone is chief product and technology officer at Netflix. She joined the company in 2020 after leadership roles in data, science, engineering, and operations at Lyft and Nuna.

Stone's path from economist and trader to data and technology executive gives her an unusually broad operating perspective. At Netflix, her work now combines product and technology leadership, connecting engineering, data, and product decisions inside a global consumer platform.

Susie Wee is co-founder and CEO of DevAI, an enterprise AI startup. She previously spent years at Cisco, where she founded DevNet and held senior technology leadership roles including CTO.

Wee built Cisco DevNet into a major developer program before moving into entrepreneurship. Her work includes developer ecosystems, APIs, enterprise platforms, AI, and digital transformation, pairing hands-on innovation programs with experience leading technology communities inside a global enterprise.

John Allspaw is a principal at Adaptive Capacity Labs, former CTO of Etsy, author, and researcher. His work connects software operations with resilience engineering, incidents, and human factors.

Allspaw helped shape early DevOps thinking and now studies how people understand and respond to failures in complex systems. His research, workshops, and talks challenge simplistic incident models and give technology leaders richer ways to learn from outages, strengthen resilience, and evaluate automation.