Speaker Bio
Snezhana Chaykina is Software Development Manager/Site Engineering Manager in Thomas Cook (UK). With over 13 years of experience across the IT industry, her recent role is leading multiple distributed teams to build and maintain the platform which offers holidays in popular spots around the globe to millions of customers.
Snezhana manages and mentors developers, shaping roadmaps, assessing and improving skills, driving quality and maintaining security across dozens of interconnected services. She ensures the teams continually improve and deliver on roadmap commitments, influences culture, facilitates technical delivery, and works with the teams on strategy and execution.
She is a founder of Experts in Tech https://expertsintech.co.uk, a non profit IT community that gathers tech people with diverse skillsets and background who want to make the difference for their industry. This platform focuses on four main streams: IT mentoring program that aims to provide volunteer coaching from highly experienced IT professionals to develop leadership and management skills for high-potential leaders; Regular online/offline meetups for IT managers during which the organiser is sharing people management techniques and the participants work together to resolve practical cases in IT; apart from that the website lists IT jobs and professional meetups and conferences.
Past initiatives: Contributed into development of digital transformation in the company. Defined and implemented new structure and ways of working based on Spotify Tribe model to improve efficiency, and deliver technological value in flexible and scalable way. Changed the culture by breaking silos between developers, QAs and DevOps, putting the customers and values delivered at the heart of the development practices.
She was also a co-founder of the IT outsourcing company.
She has relocated to the United Kingdom in April 2022 in result of the Russian-Ukrainian war and is keen to contribute to the UK IT industry to make UK a global tech superpower
