Rippling Engineering Presents: Embracing Founder Mode in a Scaling Startup

Please join us at our third event in this tech series where we invite great minds and innovators in the industry to share their stories. At this event, we will host some amazing speakers, outlined below. We hope to see you there!

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Panel Discussion

Jackie Xu | Engineering Manager @ Rippling

Jackie Xu is the Engineering Manager of Rippling’s Time Off & Leave Management team. Our Time Off team helps our customer's employees manage time away from work e.g. vacations, sick days, and parental leave, both in the US and globally. Prior to Rippling, Jackie was a two time founder backed by YC, First Round and Accel. Join us to learn how former formers use their startup superpowers to maximize their impact in a larger organization.

Jonathan Como | Principal Engineer @ Rippling

Jonathan is a Principal Engineer currently leading the efforts to build a new suite of products targeting sales and customer support. Prior to this role, he was a tech lead for HR Products where he built Rippling’s Scheduling product from the ground up, and where he enabled new capabilities such as “standalone” which allows Rippling to sell their suite of products without requiring HRIS and Payroll. Jonathan is also one of Rippling’s many ex-founders.

Rustam Lalkaka | Co-founder & CEO @ Firetiger

Rustam Lalkaka is co-founder and CEO of Firetiger, a startup building next-generation software observability tools. Prior to Firetiger, Rustam was VP of Product at Cloudflare, where he spent seven years leading their networking and observability products, growing the businesses to power over 20% of the Internet. Earlier in his career, he spent time at Microsoft and co-founded two healthcare technology companies. Rustam lives in San Francisco where he enjoys big wall climbing and overly intricate fermentation projects.

Abhishek Rai | Senior Director of Engineering @ Databricks

Abhishek is a seasoned engineering leader currently serving as the Senior Director of Engineering at Databricks, where he supports the team behind the company's scalable compute platform. Previously, he co-founded NetSpring, now part of Optimizely, serving as Chief Architect, focusing on customer analytics for digital products.

Before that, at ThoughtSpot, Abhishek was a Co-Founder and Vice President of Engineering, where he helped grow the company to $100MM ARR and established it as a leader in the BI space. His earlier experience includes a pivotal role at Google as a Staff Software Engineer on the Borg compute platform and contributions to large-scale distributed systems.

Ankit Bhatia | Chief Technology Officer @ People.ai

Ankit Bhatia is a seasoned technology leader and entrepreneur, currently serving as the Chief Technology Officer at People.ai. He brings a wealth of experience from his roles at major tech companies, including Google and Tableau, where he led engineering teams and drove product innovations.

Ankit co-founded ScaleGrid, Inc., where he focused on strategy and product development for their Database as a Service (DBaaS), highlighting his entrepreneurial acumen. His leadership journey also includes significant contributions at Looker, where he helped elevate the company’s status in the BI sector. With deep expertise in engineering and product development, Ankit is committed to fostering innovation and growth in the tech industry.

Doors will open at 5:30 PM PT and our sessions will begin at 6:30 PM PT! Light apps, snacks and beverages will be available before and after our panel discussion.