Speakers

Ben Fried- VP & CIO

Ben is Google’s Chief Information Officer, overseeing the technologies that make Googlers go. He’s the New York office Tech Site Lead, responsible for 3000 Googlers in the company's East Coast headquarters. Ben has a diverse background in systems engineering and software

development. He led development of mission scheduling software for NASA at a bay area startup, and spent over a decade at Morgan Stanley, where he rose to the level of Managing Director, and led teams responsible for software development, internet infrastructure, and business intelligence.

Ben is a graduate of Columbia University.

Inga Kulberg Tesler- Director of Staffing

Inga Kulberg Tesler is a Director of Staffing. She and her team focus on ensuring Google hires the world's most innovative people for Google Cloud teams. Inga's focus includes helping business leaders build amazing teams that are innovative, high functioning and have diversity of thought.

Inga has been in HR for over 15 years and has experience in managing high performing HR and Staffing organizations and teams at startups like Napster as well as at Fortune 500 Companies like Walmart.

Jannie Affeld- Director, Application Engineer

Jannie Affeld is a seasoned leader with 24 years of IT experience. Since 2016, she has served as the Director for Corporate Engineering at Alphabet/Google, where she oversees a global team of over 100 that builds, implements, and integrates financial applications used by the Alphabet and Google Finance teams. Her mission at Google is to innovate using latest technology, optimize operation, and scale Google’s financial systems and processes to support Alphabet's incredible growth. Prior to Google, Jannie held a series of senior positions at fortune 50 companies including Visa, Cisco, HP and Oracle.

Jannie received a bachelor’s degree in accounting and finance from Xiamen University and a master’s degree in information systems from Arizona State University.

Meghna Punhani- Senior Program Manager & Chief of Staff, Google Works Effectiveness

Meghna works with the Google's corporate engineering executive team to drive and execute on our company's strategic plans. Our organization is responsible for partnering with internal stakeholders such as People Ops, Real Estate Services, Finance, Legal and Marketing to build products that make Googlers successful everyday. As an extension to the leadership team, I'm responsible for leading several cross functional initiatives such as planning, operations, communications, and employee engagements ensuring organizational effectiveness in delivering world class products for Googlers.

Tracy Ferrell- Infrastructure Lead

Tracy leads a global team of Site Reliability Engineers (or SRE’s). The SRE’s at Google are responsible for building and running the solid base for all the cool services, and in the case of CorpEng, the services that make Googlers go.

SRE is fundamentally doing work that has historically been done by an operations team, but using engineers with software expertise, and banking that these engineers are inherently predisposed to design and implement automation with software to replace human labor. Do it once, okay, do it twice, maybe okay, but never do it three times - automate is our moto.

Tracy has been at Google for just over 4 years, how grown her team from 30 to almost 80 in three locations maturing processes along the way. Prior to Google, she spent stints in major tech companies in Silicon Valley including Adobe, Apple, NetApp, Chevron, IBM and was a road warrior at Accenture. Tracy is passionate about building inclusive engineering teams and cultures and shows it by spending much time teaching implicit bias awareness and accountability. In her spare time, she runs and is an emerging CrossFit fanatic.

Tracy is a graduate of Purdue University in Electrical Engineering.

Alberto Melgoza- Application Engineer

Alberto has over 12 years of experience building large enterprise financial applications as well as BI and data analytics solutions. He has been at Google for five years and is currently an Application Engineer with focus on FP&A Systems. Alberto is currently studying to get his Master’s in Data Science at Berkeley. Prior to Google Alberto worked at GE, NBCUniversal, Comcast, and Dish Network. During college, Alberto worked as a radio talk show host at a local radio station.

Talk Topic: Building the next generation financial planning and forecasting platform

Description: Continued hyper-growth across several areas of the company, for example Hardware and Cloud, means exciting business opportunities and highly complex problems. By leveraging Google's cutting-edge technologies, our teams provide business leaders with the infrastructure, functionality, and data insights they need to make effective decisions that translate into Google being one of the most valuable companies in the world.

Andrew McLaughlin- Engineering Manager

Andrew is an Engineering Manager leading a number of products used by Googlers to manage their careers (performance management, compensation, learning and development, etc.). He started at Google as a software engineer 11 years ago; during his time here he has consistently focused on internal users — from systems that manage Google’s vast hardware assets, to developer productivity tools, to mobile testing infrastructure.