Meet our speakers

Explore the speakers bringing practical insights, customer stories, and technical expertise to Xcelerate NYC.

Hear from these great speakers

PiPI Safety & Security Engineer, Python Software Foundation | Talk: Building a foundation for the AI era

Mike Fiedler

Mike is a professional engineer with over three decades of experience, having held senior leadership roles at companies including Datadog, MongoDB, LeafLink, Warby Parker, and Paribus (Capital One). He is dedicated to continuous learning and mentoring. He is a recognized contributor to the tech community, having been a conference speaker since 2012. His accolades include the Awesome Community Chef Award (2016) and being an AWS Container Hero since 2018. Currently working as the PyPI Safety & Security Engineer at the Python Software Foundation, he devotes his free time to working on open source tools, learning new technologies, and volunteering as a roller derby referee. With a holistic view of systems and software and a passion for problem-solving, Mike helps others navigate the complexities of the tech world. He can be found on Mastodon, GitHub, and elsewhere online, or wearing stripes at a roller derby game near you.

Senior Director and Enterprise Architect, Life Time | Talk: AI at the edge: A conversation with Life Time

Marc Gillitzer

Marc leads digital modernization across the enterprise with a focus on innovative technologies. With more than 26 years at Life Time, Marc joined the company when it was a $32 million business, developing what became the mission-critical stack that still drives member management today. As Life Time grew into a $3 billion-plus enterprise, he focused on APIs, cloud platforms, and microservice implementations — progressing from hands-on development and infrastructure engineering into team leadership. More recently, he focuses on AI deployment and FinOps at Life Time for both member and team member services. That career arc, from writing code to shaping enterprise strategy, positions him uniquely to bridge the gap between technical teams and business outcomes, translating complex technology decisions into long-term organizational value. Earlier, Marc built his experience as a software consultant and instructor, giving him a practitioner’s perspective that was the foundation for his architectural thinking today. His role extends well beyond architecture, partnering closely with Legal, Security, and Private Equity teams on technology acquisition and business continuity.

SVP of Digital Streaming and Video Operations, Paramount | Talk: When the world is watching: Paramount’s approach to flawless live events

Andrew Graziano

As SVP of Digital Streaming and Video Operations for Paramount+, Andrew leads a global team responsible for all digital streaming technologies, video on demand publishing, global live event signal acquisition and live event operations on the service. He also manages a 24/7 global video operations team responsible for ensuring the service runs at the highest possible levels of quality and reliability. Andrew manages a team of 150+ employees responsible for all live and VOD operations across 9 global markets on 20+ streaming platforms

Special Agent in Charge (SAC), FBI, New York Office | Panel: Securing the modern attack surface in the age of AI

Amit Kachhia-Patel

Mr. Kachhia-Patel is a seasoned FBI Agent with 20+ years of experience with a deep expertise in leading large-scale technology and cyber operations. He currently serves in a Senior Executive Service (SES) role based in New York City, overseeing complex mission-critical programs at the intersection of national security, cyber defense and organizational strategy. With a career built as a frontline operational leader, to include crisis response on high profile cases and advisor to three FBI Directors, Mr. Kachhia-Patel intimately worked Operation Ghost Stories resulting in a historic spy swap of 10 Russian sleeper agents in 2010. He also managed some of the largest cyber incidents to include Sony Pictures destructive malware attack, OPM and Anthem hacks. Mr. Kachhia-Patel holds a B.S. in Computer Science from Rutgers University and serves as Co-Chair for the International Conference on Cyber Security (ICCS) held every 18 months in partnership with Fordham University.

VP of Engineering, The Weather Company | Talk: A platform for the always-on economy: The Weather Company on Fastly

Adam McDaniel

[Bio Coming Soon]

Director of Engineering, CarGurus | Talk: How CarGurus builds resilient applications with layered security

Billy Oreste

As Director of Engineering, Billy oversees the Cloud Platform and Reliability organizations at CarGurus. He also leads a cross-functional team focused on protecting CarGurus’ data from bots and scraping. With more than 25 years of experience building infrastructure and security architectures across technology and financial services, Billy focuses on creating resilient, secure platforms that enable organizations to scale with confidence.

Principal Infrastructure Engineer, Wayfair | Talk: How Wayfair unlocks developer velocity at the edge

Dan Rowe

Dan has spent more than 20 years working across the full request path — from the edge, through the application, to the platform underneath it. He drives infrastructure and edge architecture for Wayfair's high-traffic ecommerce sites, where complex routing and traffic-shaping requirements keep speed and performance top of mind. Dan helped design and build an edge application, running on Fastly Compute, that executes on every request to Wayfair's sites, moving common request logic to the edge to unlock developer velocity without giving up reliability or performance.

Global CISO, Kraken Technologies | Panel: Securing the modern attack surface in the age of AI

Alex Shulman, PhD

Alex is the Global CISO at Kraken Technologies, securing the AI-powered platform accelerating the clean energy transition across continents. Previously, she served as a Cybersecurity Managing Director at EY and led Cloud Security at Citibank and IBM Research. A computer science pioneer with 14 patents and 30+ publications, Alex holds PhD, MSc, and BSc degrees, specializing in machine learning, AI, and computer vision.

Head of Security Advisory, BMO Financial Group | Panel: Securing the modern attack surface in the age of AI

Larry Zelvin

Larry is the Head of Security Advisory at BMO Financial Group, where he is responsible globally for advising BMO partners, clients, and communities on cyber security, fraud, physical security, and crisis management trends, threats, and best practices. He's frequently called on to advise public and private sector leaders, companies, media, and communities on security matters, drawing on his long career in security and crisis management.

Founder & CTO, Fastly | Talk: Building a foundation for the AI era

Artur Bergman

Artur Bergman is the Chief Technology Officer and Founder at Fastly. Since co-founding Fastly in 2011, Artur has helped shepherd the company’s evolution in a variety of roles including Chief Executive Officer, Chief Architect, and Chairperson of the Board of Directors. Prior to co-founding Fastly, Artur held a number of leadership and management roles, including Chief Technology Officer of Wikia, Inc., a global community knowledge-sharing platform, Engineering Manager for SixApart Ltd., a social networking service, and Fotango, Ltd., a subsidiary of Canon Europe.

CEO, Fastly | Talk: A platform for the always-on economy: The Weather Company on Fastly

Kip Compton

Kip Compton joined Fastly in January 2024 as Chief Product Officer and has served as our Chief Executive Officer since June 2025. Prior to joining Fastly, Mr. Compton served as the Senior Vice President of Strategy & Business Development of the Cisco Networking business from 2020 to August 2023, where he led teams responsible for strategy, portfolio management, investments and acquisitions. Prior to that, he held various roles at Cisco since January 2006. Mr. Compton brings more than 25 years of senior leadership experience driving innovation in cloud, video, Internet of Things (IoT) and networking. He has a long and proven track record of growing teams and businesses, including creating partnerships and investments to drive growth and open new markets. Mr. Compton holds both a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science and Engineering and a Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an MBA from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

Principal Product Technology Manager, Fastly | Talk: How CarGurus builds resilient applications with layered security

Daniel Corbett

Daniel Corbett is a Principal Product Technology Manager on the Product team. He has over 15 years of security practitioner experience and has previously worked at a high-traffic managed hosting provider where he was architecting and building secure infrastructure, mitigating threats and attacks of varying degrees, and performing incident response. Daniel is a passionate teacher and mentor who enjoys helping others. When he's not working you can find him spending time with his family, working on home improvement projects, or trying to duplicate meals from his favorite restaurants.

SVP, Engineering, Fastly | Talk: When agents meet infrastructure: Security, sovereignty, and resilience

Hossein Lotfi

Hossein Lotfi is the SVP of Engineering at Fastly. Prior to assuming this role in 2025, Hossein led the engineering groups responsible for building reliable, highly scalable, cost-effective, and low-latency systems that power Fastly’s network services and serve as the foundation for its broader product offerings. His teams spanned the entire tech stack, from hardware and network architecture to kernel-level optimization and low-latency data paths, all the way up to traffic engineering and edge systems like caching and workload management. Hossein brings over 20 years of experience building global-scale systems including hyper-scale cloud infrastructure, web performance engineering group at another major CDN, and co-founding a network validation startup. He holds several patents in traffic engineering, load balancing, and large-scale system designs in edge networks. The early days of Hossein's career were spent in the Middle East at the forefront of a country's digital transformation. While also earning a bachelor's degree in Electronics Engineering, he helped with the nationwide expansion of the internet, bringing people online—some for the very first time.

Principal Product Manager, Metacognition, Fastly | Talk: When the world is watching: Paramount’s approach to flawless live events

Angela Mitchell

Angela Mitchell is a product innovation leader dedicated to creating frictionless experiences and designing systems that self-derive their own optimal structure. As Principal Product Manager of Metacognition at Fastly, she drives the strategy for our unified contextual intelligence layer - spanning analytics engine convergence, data packaging, and customer support. Before Fastly, Angela served as Senior Director of Technology at Comcast, where she led development of an omnichannel communications platform handling millions of monthly interactions across voice, social, retail, and tech installers. Her R&D background includes advancing interactive discovery and video delivery infrastructure for iOS, Android, and SmartTV platforms across providers such as Charter, Starz, and CenturyLink. Angela was named to Multichannel News' “40 Under 40,” holds a Master’s in IT, and multiple patents across video streaming, media distribution, and most recently detection of quantum phenomen.

Global Field CISO, Financial Services, Fastly | Panel: Securing the modern attack surface in the age of AI

Samir Sherif

Samir is the Global Field CISO at Fastly, where he works at the intersection of cybersecurity, resilience, and digital transformation. With more than two decades of executive leadership across global banking, financial services, and enterprise technology, he brings a rare blend of deep regulatory insight and hands-on security strategy. His career has focused on helping organizations navigate complex risk environments, build resilient security programs, and align cybersecurity with business growth in highly regulated and high-stakes industries.

Chief Product Officer, Fastly | Talk: Evolving our platform for what’s next

Kelly Shortridge

Kelly Shortridge is Fastly’s Chief Product Officer after leading Fastly’s Security business and serving in the Office of the CTO. Her experience spans B2B product leadership, entrepreneurship (as a startup founder with an exit to CrowdStrike), and investment banking (M&A covering the cybersecurity and AI sectors). Kelly is lead author of Security Chaos Engineering: Sustaining Resilience in Software and Systems (O'Reilly Media) and is best known as a leading-edge expert on software resilience, modernizing cybersecurity to align with platform engineering and DevOps approaches, and the application of behavioral economics to cyber defense. Kelly frequently advises Fortune 500s, investors, startups, and federal agencies and has spoken at major technology conferences internationally, including Black Hat, RSA Conference, and KubeCon. Her research has been featured in prestigious computer science journals like ACM, IEEE, and USENIX, spanning behavioral science in cybersecurity, deception strategies, and the ROI of software resilience. Kelly also serves on the editorial board of ACM Queue. Kelly holds a Bachelor’s of Arts in Economics from Vassar College.

Senior Director, Technology Intelligence, Fastly | Talk: AI at the edge: A conversation with Life Time

Austin Spires

Austin Spires is Senior Director, Technology Intelligence at Fastly, where he focuses on user experience. He’s been working on developer tools and customer happiness for many years, and frequently speaks at conferences and meetups. Before Fastly, Austin worked in sales and support at GitHub, where he helped lead customer onboarding. Originally from Texas, Austin plays a mean bass and likes drinking the occasional beer.

Responsable produit, expérience développeur

Jesse von Doom

Responsable produit pour l’équipe DX, Jesse von Doom a rejoint Fastly dans le cadre de Glitch. Avant Glitch, il a été directeur numérique de la Mozilla Foundation, membre de la Shuttleworth Foundation, et directeur exécutif de CASH Music. Il adore les arcs-en-ciel.