2026_attendees

Yulia Groza has over 20 years of experience in various leadership roles in the technology and engineering fields. Yulia currently holds the position of VP Engineering, Commerce Solutions at Blackhawk Network. Prior to this, they worked at Levi Strauss & Co., where they were the VP of Consumer and Commerce Technologies, responsible for leading and growing technologies for both retail and wholesale digital channels. Yulia also worked as the VP of Ecommerce Technology and Sr. Director of eCommerce IT at Levi Strauss & Co. In addition, Yulia has experience at The Men’s Wearhouse, Inc and GEC Walmart.com, where they held director and manager positions in engineering and integration departments. Yulia started their career as a software engineer at Moldova Agriondbank and CB Moldova Agroindbank. Yulia has a strong background in building ecommerce and omni-channel applications, managing teams, and delivering technology roadmaps.

From 1989 to 1994, Yulia Groza attended the Technical University of Moldova, where they obtained a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science.

Stephen M. Dick is a senior infrastructure and cloud engineering leader who specializes in turning complex, distributed systems into reliable, cost-efficient platforms at scale. As VP of Infrastructure, Cloud and Platform Engineering at Paylocity, he leads a 150+ person global organization spanning AWS, Azure and physical data centers, where his teams design, build and run hybrid cloud environments that support high-growth SaaS workloads. His track record includes cutting infrastructure spend by double digits while increasing capacity, driving mean-time-to-recovery down from hours to minutes, and consistently achieving 99.99 percent availability through mature SRE, DevOps and FinOps practices.

Across prior roles at companies such as BetterCloud, Salesforce, SAP and others, Stephen has built and scaled reliability and cloud engineering teams that directly impact revenue, customer retention and product velocity. He has led technical due diligence and post-merger platform integration for multi-billion-dollar acquisitions including MuleSoft and Marketo, launched automated FedRAMP-ready platforms that opened new regulated markets, and embedded FinOps disciplines that brought cloud costs from double-digit COGS to sub six percent of revenue. A regular industry voice as a FinOps Foundation member, Silicon Valley chapter president for the DevOps Institute and member of the IDC CIO Executive Council, he combines hands-on cloud expertise with boardroom fluency, positioning infrastructure and reliability as strategic growth levers rather than back-office cost centers.

Joshua “JP” Onffroy is an engineering executive who builds high-performing global organizations at the intersection of hardware, software and AI-enabled healthcare. As Vice President of R&D for Surgical Robotics Systems, Software and AI/ML Data Platforms at Johnson & Johnson, he leads multidisciplinary teams developing robotic-assisted solutions for endoluminal and soft-tissue surgery, lung cancer diagnosis and kidney stone treatment. His work spans telemetry-driven analytics, AI-based anatomical segmentation, navigation systems and digital platforms that support physicians, hospitals and patients worldwide. JP combines deep technical fluency with business acumen, having helped scale businesses from zero to billion-dollar revenue, overseen organizations from a few dozen to thousands of people, and repeatedly guided products from incubation to mature, in-market portfolios.

Prior to Johnson & Johnson, JP held senior roles across cloud, data infrastructure and digital health, including Vice President of R&D for diagnostic radiology imaging, disease management and healthcare analytics at Philips, where he led a $90M+ R&D organization delivering SaaS and on-premises platforms used by thousands of customers globally. Earlier, as Vice President of Cloud Infrastructure Engineering and Cloud/SaaS Operations at IBM, he steered large-scale secure API lifecycle and hybrid cloud products, and at VCE (later Dell/EMC) he helped build one of the fastest-growing converged infrastructure businesses to multi-billion-dollar scale. Trained as an electrical and computer engineer with an MBA in IT, and named on multiple patents in converged infrastructure and resource profiling, JP brings a systems-level view to modernizing existing products while launching new AI-powered solutions in digital health and data-intensive enterprises.

Ning Qu is a senior technology leader at the intersection of operating systems, AI infrastructure and software-defined vehicles. As VP of Engineering and Global Head of Software Platform at NIO, he leads the SkyOS team, responsible for designing and delivering NIO’s next-generation full-vehicle operating system. SkyOS spans multiple OS kernels and a broad middleware stack, supporting all major ECU domains from motion and body control to digital cockpit and AD/ADAS, and underpins NIO’s SDV vision across both premium and mainstream brands. Under his leadership, SkyOS has been deployed on multiple models, powering vehicles like the ONVO L60 at scale and forming the software foundation for NIO’s multi-brand, multi-model strategy and future AI-first in-vehicle experience.

Before NIO, Ning held key engineering and leadership roles at Waymo, Baidu, Google and NVIDIA, consistently working on high-performance, safety-critical platforms. At Waymo, he led the ML Runtime team, building runtime frameworks and performance optimizations that helped bring a new autonomous driving stack to production on Jaguar EVs and supported the rider-only launch in San Francisco. At Baidu, he headed the CarOS/Apollo OS team, where he designed and launched Cyber RT, a high-performance runtime framework for autonomous driving, and led functional safety and systems work aligned with ISO 26262 and SOTIF. Earlier in his career he contributed to Linux kernel, cloud security and GPU architecture projects at Google and NVIDIA, with several patents and publications in system security and virtualization. Ning holds a PhD and bachelor’s degree in computer science from Peking University and has been an active community leader, including serving as president and chairman of the Peking University Alumni Association of Northern California.