Georgie Steele
CTO & Cofounder
Georgie Steele is Co-Founder and CTO of Maiven, a climate tech startup building AI systems that make complex regulation actionable at scale. She raised £1.5M pre-seed in two weeks and shipped the MVP two months later — a platform combining retrieval-augmented generation, proprietary scoring, and expert-in-the-loop feedback for enterprise customers.
An award-winning engineer recognised by Forbes 30 Under 30, Georgie has led high-impact technical teams across McLaren, Tractable, and Sylvera - scaling backend platforms tenfold, contributing to a unicorn valuation, and consistently building in high-stakes, fast-moving environments.
She is also a committed advocate for diversity in tech, having mentored over 100 underrepresented technologists and represented UN Women UK at the UN Commission on the Status of Women.
Georgie speaks on building trustworthy AI products, scaling teams without sacrificing speed or safety, and what engineering leadership actually requires in the AI era.
What Shape Are You? Rethinking Engineering Leadership in the AI Era
Somewhere along the way, engineering leadership got defined as the art of excellent execution. Understand the requirements, build the thing well, ship on time. And for a long time, that was enough.
It isn't anymore.
AI has thinned out the layers between technical decisions and commercial outcomes. Smaller teams, faster cycles, fewer people holding customer context upstream of the engineers who need it. The result? Brilliant technical leaders making expensive decisions in the dark: optimising for depth and accuracy that nobody asked for, in products built for the wrong customer entirely.
This session introduces the flower-shaped professional: a practical model for what senior engineering leadership actually requires right now. We'll look at which petals matter most, what it looks like to test for them in hiring, and how to honestly assess which ones you still need to grow yourself.
Grounded in real experience building AI products from zero, and the hard lessons that come with it.