Melissa Benua

Melissa Benua has worked in nearly every software development role - dev, test, DevOps, and engineering leadership - at companies ranging from Boeing and Microsoft to gaming startups and hypergrowth data platforms. She's built and scaled high-availability services for Bing, Cortana, Xbox, and PlayFab, and led the engineering teams that generated millions of lines of AI-written code per week at mParticle and Rokt while cutting bug escape rates by over 20%.

Today she serves as VP of Engineering at Rokt and as a tech advisor through queenofcode.dev, helping founders from pre-Seed through Series A build and ship production software. Melissa discovered her love of massively-scaled systems while growing the Bing backend, where she honed the art of keeping highly-available complex systems up while undergoing significant code churn. An experienced group engineering leader, she's passionate not only about maximizing efficiency in her teams' product code and in their dev workflows, but about turning that into maximized value for her companies and their customers.

Melissa speaks on engineering fundamentals in the agentic era: the planning, testing, CI, and observability disciplines that don't just survive AI velocity, but enable it. Her thesis: safety isn't the opposite of speed. It's the engine.