The Elevator
A curated community for senior DevOps leaders
Elevate your craft—connect with peers, exchange real-world insights, and stay ahead of the curve in software delivery.
What is The Elevator?
The Elevator is a private, invite-only community for senior DevOps and platform engineering leaders at some of the world’s most advanced software teams. Our mission is simple: create a trusted space for honest, off-the-record conversations around modern software delivery, CI/CD, and scaling engineering systems.
We host monthly, low-lift Zoom sessions where members can swap stories, troubleshoot problems, and share what’s working (and what’s not). No prep. No pitches. Just real talk with real practitioners.
Why join?
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💬 Monthly peer roundtables — One-hour Zooms with vetted peers
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🔒 Confidential, pitch-free environment — No vendors or recruiters
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⚙️ Tactical and strategic discussions — Learn how others are solving the same problems
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🧠 Curated for senior leaders — Hear from people building and scaling CI/CD and developer platforms
Who is it for?
The Elevator is best suited for engineering leaders working on developer infrastructure and internal platforms—typically folks in roles like:
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Head of Platform Engineering
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Director of DevOps / SRE
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Senior engineers owning CI/CD, infra, or developer experience
If you’re leading or influencing how software gets built and shipped at your company, we’d love to hear from you.
Past Topics & Guests
Each session features candid, off-the-record conversations led by experienced practitioners from top engineering teams.
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AI Dev Tools – Adoption and Impact
Real-world stories on adopting AI tools in engineering orgs—use cases, impact on delivery cycles, developer expectations, and lessons learned.
Featured Guest
Tinder -
Testing in the Bazel Ecosystem
Behind the scenes with Yun Peng on testing workflows in Bazel’s open-source ecosystem and building a golden path for contributors.
Featured Guest
Bazel OSS Team (Google) -
2025 DevOps & Platform Planning
A group planning session comparing dev platform roadmaps, key priorities, emerging opportunities, and trends heading into the new year.
Featured Guest
Slack, Anthropic, and others -
Driving Developer Productivity at Scale
A deep dive into metrics, bottlenecks, and scaling strategies for dev productivity—plus how leading teams align platform efforts to business goals.
Featured Guest
Slack -
Build vs. Buy Trade-Offs in Engineering Efficiency
Exploring how platform teams decide between building vs. buying tooling, and how to manage vendor relationships, internal tech debt, and long-term scalability.
Featured Guest
Roblox
How to Join
The Elevator is a curated community. To maintain high-quality conversations, we ask everyone to apply. Use the form to apply then we will review your info and follow up within a few days.
How it works
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One Zoom session per month
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60 minutes, no prep, no slides
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Lightly facilitated, small group conversations
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Everything is off the record
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Optional participation each month
Our Values
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✅ We share openly and respectfully
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✅ We uphold confidentiality and peer trust
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❌ No sales pitches or product demos
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❌ No recruiting or marketing outreach