Sara Heitkamp
Bio
I’m a people-first, high-energy engineering leader specializing in Site Reliability Engineering, Incident leadership, and operational resilience at scale with 10+ years of experience managing Incidents and living the #oncalllife spanning Fortune 50 and Fortune 500 companies across e-commerce retail, telecommunications, SaaS, and highly regulated healthcare. I bring energy, momentum, and even joy (sometimes even dancing!) to the work so that people and platforms thrive together.
I've recently wondered is everything falling apart?! as I've navigated career losses, my son's autism diagnosis and worked through health issues (including surviving septic shock).
I’m a mom to a 22-year-old daughter and a 9-year-old son, and raising them has been both my greatest joy and my greatest teacher. I love creating moments of adventure, curiosity, and connection with them. Outside of work, I’m drawn to movement and growth—whether that’s volleyball, strength training, yoga, learning a new skill or getting lost in a good book. I’m always exploring ways to live with more intention, energy, and authenticity.
Presenting Sessions
Past Presentations
Participating Sessions
- 🚀 AI Is Changing What Matters in Software
- Shipping Atoms and Bits: What Building Physical Products Taught Me About Better Engineering Decisions
- Don't Rip and Replace: how to avoid the shiny upgrade pitfall in long-term systems
- 3D Printing: Getting Started
- Owning your engineering career progression and some advice from Tom Hanks
- What Happens When You Combine Bad Bunny + AI + Mental Health?
- Questions to ask during a transition... and who can help.
- ✨ Let’s animate! ✨ An Introduction to Rive.app
- You can do it all, just not all at once: Practical prioritization for leaders and builders
- UNLOCKING PRODUCTIVITY: THE POWER OF AI TOOLS IN THE WORKPLACE V4
- More... "Diagrams to Get your $hit together"
- How To Talk With Your Team About Best Practices (a new way of efficiently discussing and prioritizing the best practices that matter most to your team)
- Architecting Your Life OS: Applying Scaling Frameworks to Personal Growth
- Lowering Anxiety for Product & UX/UI Designers (or anyone!) -or- How Language and Perspective Shape Work Dynamics
- You’re Not Leading. You’re Reacting.
- Resume Refresh: Ready for AI, Designed to Impress
- More Than a User: Bringing Unreasonable Hospitality into IT Support
- The Five Poisons of Business: Transforming the Patterns That Hold Us Back
- No One Has the Full Picture (Especially in Complex Systems)
- AI Is Becoming Infrastructure: Why Context Engineering and Platforms Will Define the Next Decade
- Lessons learned building LAIC: Life Time’s AI Concierge
- How AI can help bring balance to our souls instead of taking that balance away
- 🔥😌 Calm in the Chaos: Real-World Incident Management (and the Stuff We Don’t Talk About)