Melissa Benua
Engineering Leader & Speaker
About Me
Melissa Benua has worked in nearly every software development role — dev, test, DevOps, and program leadership - companies big and small and somewhere in-between. She's created and run high availability, high-quality services for PlayFab, Bing, Cortana, Xbox One, and mParticle's enormous data platform. She currently leads platform and developer experience at Rokt.
Melissa discovered her love of massively-scaled systems while growing the Bing backend, where she honed the art of keeping highly-available complex systems up while undergoing significant code churn. An experienced group engineering leader, she's passionate not only about maximizing efficiency in her teams' product code and in their dev workflows, but about turning that into maximized value for her companies and their customers.
A frequent international speaker, Melissa loves to drive leadership and development best practices across the tech world at large. She's a proven Agentic AI expert and has helped companies adopt and scale solutions that improve development speed by more than 80%.
Career Highlights
Rokt
VP of Engineering, Platform / Developer Experiences • Current
Leading AI-augmented developer experience and agentic AI solutions across the SDLC; platform and developer experience post-acquisition.
Queen of Code
Consulting + Speaking • Current
Outcome-based consulting for pre-Seed through Series A: hiring, scaling, architecture, MVPs for funding, pitch decks, and board reports.
mParticle
Senior Director of Engineering • Previous
Built Platform engineering group (>30 heads); Seattle office 1→20 in one year; SRE and delivery transforms; ~100 person org change (hiring, career ladder, SDLC). Acquired by Rokt.
PlayFab
Senior Backend Engineer • Previous
Engineer #4 (Seed stage). Spanned eng, PM, QA, devops; created dev process that cut delivery time ~60% and shipped 100k SLOC with zero downtime. Acquired by Microsoft.
Expertise
Engineering Leadership
Building and leading high-performing engineering teams that deliver exceptional results.
Massively-Scaled Systems
Designing and maintaining high-availability, complex systems at scale.
DevOps Excellence
Implementing efficient development workflows and operational best practices.
Technical Speaking
Delivering engaging talks on engineering leadership and technical excellence.