Join the WEST community for a panel about 'Climbing the Technical Ladder' hosted by Goodreads. Hear from a panel of professional women in technical roles talk about the obstacles women face and suggestions for overcoming them.

Women comprise an increasingly smaller proportion of the tech workforce at each successive level, moving from entry to mid to high. Panelists will share their stories and thoughts on obstacles women face when pursuing career opportunities as well as the tips that they've learned along the way.

Agenda:

5:00pm - 5:30pm : Check-in and Networking

5:30pm - 5:50pm: Introduction about the WEST community and Goodreads

5:50pm - 6:45pm: Panel discussion

6:45pm - 7:00pm: Interactive session

7:00pm - 7:10pm: Closing thoughts

Speakers:

Elizabeth Chandler (Goodreads Co-founder & Editor in Chief )

Elizabeth Khuri Chandler co-founded Goodreads with her now-husband Otis Chandler in 2007. Over the past ten years they developed the site from the ground up to the Amazon subsidiary it is today, with more than 75 million members. Initially she not only worked on product but oversaw and produced all language on the site, editorial products, PR, marketing and community building strategy. Today she continues to oversee the editorial products at Goodreads and all outbound communications. Prior to Goodreads she was a journalist and editor at the Los Angeles Times Sunday Magazine, and the former managing editor of SOMA Magazine. She has written for Time Magazine, Women’s Wear Daily, the OC Weekly, Robb Report, Dance Magazine and other publications. Currently, Elizabeth is on the board of World Reader, a nonprofit that works globally to increase the number of readers around the world. She has B.A. from Stanford in English (Premed with a minor in Human Biology) and a M.A. from USC in Journalism.

Joy Ebertz (Staff Software Engineer, Box)

Joy has worked on a number of different teams in various roles throughout Box but most recently she has spent her time on teams focusing on different aspects of splitting our monolithic codebase into microservices. She has experience as both an individual contributor as well as managing and has also worked at everything from a 4 person startup to Microsoft. In addition to her work, Joy is also passionate about building diverse and inclusive workplaces and was one of the founding members of Box's women in tech group. She blogs on various topics related to women in tech, career and technology on Medium at https://medium.com/@jkebertz. When not at work, you will most likely find Joy running very long distances.

Jasmine Park (Principal Product Manager, Goodreads)

Jasmine is a product leader at Goodreads based in Seattle who drives our integrations across Kindle and other Amazon partners. Prior to Goodreads, Jasmine was a senior product leader at RealSelf and Microsoft. She is passionate about mentoring and connecting with other women in the tech industry, and she is excited to moderate this panel discussion.

Stela Llusha (Senior Manager, Twilio)

Stela Llusha has led Twilio’s pursuit of Operational Excellence by establishing programs, building processes and developing tools that drive cross-functional organizations to deliver industry-leading standards and technology best-practices. As Senior Manager of Developer Excellence, she has built one of the most diverse and cross-functional teams, bringing together people from various cultural, occupational and technical backgrounds working towards the same mission. Trained in Electrical Engineering with a M.S. from UC Berkeley and having spent years in management consulting at Accenture, Stela’s combined experience is ideal for developing and delivering business transformational programs for engineering organizations at scale. On a personal level, Stela is passionate about giving back to the Refugee Student Project at her alma mater, which supports young refugee women from war-torn countries in completing their education and fulfilling their dreams. It was this same project that supported her many years ago, when she was a refugee fleeing from the Kosovo War to pursue her education.

Nimmy Mathew (Software Development Manager, Goodreads)

Nimmy leads the Mobile Apps (iOS and Android) team at Goodreads and is passionate about building high performing teams that deliver results consistently. She has strong technical skills and deep experience with a variety of technologies including full stack web development , mobile app development and low level programming. Prior to her role at Goodreads, she has held technical leadership and manager roles at Orbitz.com, OfficeMax and Electronic Data Systems(EDS).

Chen Xiao (Software Engineer, Google)

Chen is a Software Engineer at Google. She has been working at Google for 11 years on a variety of products from web frontend on Google Analytics to Android client on Google Search/Assistant. She currently leads and manages the team that integrates the Google Assistant into cars (Android Auto). She received a Bachelors and Masters in Computer Science from MIT.

Sheron Li (Sr. Manager of TPM, Amazon Music)

Sheron is a delivery leader at Amazon Music who leads a high-performing team of technical program managers and product managers at delivering business critical initiatives.  She joined the Music team at a pivotal moment when the business was transforming into the streaming subscription model and personally led the launch for Prime Music.  She continued to expand her role to lead the launch of Amazon Music Unlimited service along with Alexa voice support to 42 countries.  In addition to execution excellence, Sheron is passionate about diversity inclusion at Amazon.  She is the Music representative on the diversity panel and co-founded the Girls Who Don’t Code (Yet) program to cultivate early interests in computer science and tech industry for young girls.