This panel will examine the challenges, lessons learned, and best practices around deploying, testing, troubleshooting, observability, and developer experience for large-scale IoT systems. We’ll demystify IoT + SRE/DevOps and showcase real-world perspectives.

Ale Paredes is the Director of Engineering at Viam. With a strong background in tech leadership, she has driven impactful projects at companies like Stripe and Code Climate, advancing product scalability, reliability, and team performance. As the co-founder of Latinas in Tech NYC, Ale advocates for diversity and inclusion in the tech industry. She is passionate about fostering a collaborative environment where everyone can grow their skills, deliver impactful solutions, and build resilient, scalable systems.

Jessica Garson is a Python programmer, educator, and artist. She currently works at Elastic as a Senior Developer Advocate. She previously worked in developer relations at Twitter for four years. She has spoken at conferences worldwide, from PyCon to Write the Docs. She uses code and modular synthesizers to make music and audio-reactive video art in her spare time.

Brian Annis is the Director of Site Reliability Engineering at Place Exchange. Previously he served as the Lead SRE at Intersection, a consortium member of LinkNYC. There he built a novel configuration management platform to manage thousands of disparate IoT devices across the globe. He also worked collaboratively with multiple transit providers including SETPA, CTA, and LA Metro to build innovative digital out of home networks at scale. A passionate believer in knowledge sharing, Brian has spoken at many conferences, including Ansiblefest, to share insights and challenges with the broader community. He currently lives and works in NYC.

Vinny Ruia is a robotics engineer at Firefly Automatix. In the past four years, he has helped develop significant portions of the company’s autonomous mowing program from the ground up. Vinny has also participated in agricultural robotics community events and developed autonomous boats for collegiate competitions. Vinny is excited to see the different ways that robotics and technology will be used to make lives easier.