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 20%. Today she serves as CTO at Vega and as a tech advisor through queenofcode.dev, helping founders from pre-Seed through Series A build and ship production software. 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.