ELC: NYC Roundtable on Building World-Class Engineering Teams

New York doesn’t host events. It tests them.

And tonight, ELC’s NYC Roundtable on Building World-Class Engineering Teams is stepping into that arena. Not with panels or playbooks, but with a room full of leaders who know the conversation’s changed. AI didn’t just tweak the workflow. It cracked the foundation. And now we’re all rebuilding, org charts, cultures, expectations, and definitions of “excellence” that don’t hold up under real pressure.

This roundtable isn’t a backdrop. It’s the main event. Five themes. Two hours. One shared goal: to confront what engineering leadership actually looks like when the world’s moving faster than your hiring plan. How do you build trust when your team’s never met in person? How do you define greatness when machines write faster than juniors? How do you retain when compensation’s flat and options are fiction?

These aren’t hypotheticals. They’re happening. Right now. And the people in that room? They’re the ones living it, leading through it, and, if we’re honest, struggling to make sense of it. That’s the point. No one’s showing up to posture. They’re showing up to trade scars. To share what’s breaking and what’s bending. To sharpen each other, not for sport, but for survival.

I’m walking in with questions, and a willingness to challenge the easy answers. Because “world class” doesn’t mean anything without context. Without pressure. Without clarity. If your culture only works at full headcount and high morale, you don’t have culture. You have choreography. And choreography snaps the second the beat changes.

This room is about finding the ones who can still dance when the music shifts.

Huge respect to Alpha Bah, Funmi Oludaiye, and Luxi (Lucy) Huang, CFA for curating spaces where people lead with what they don’t know yet. Where ego gets parked and learning takes the wheel. Being welcomed into this community is a privilege. Earning a voice inside it? That’s the work.

Huge thanks to Nayya for hosting + sponsoring

Sign up to join the conversation!