Stephen Salaka has spent decades navigating the tech world, from coding in the trenches to orchestrating chaos in boardrooms. With a career spanning industry giants like Tesla and Boeing, and even a stint in Japan where he discovered that debugging international systems is oddly similar to navigating karaoke nights, Stephen has seen it all.

Armed with an arsenal of experience in software engineering and leadership, he’s mastered the fine art of herding cats (a.k.a. software developers) while keeping billion-dollar projects afloat. These days, he’s enabling AI at the US's oldest ship builder (HII) while busy mentoring others to avoid his career missteps—or at least to make their own in style. When he’s not juggling the tech world’s endless quirks, you’ll find him reflecting on how his life somehow ended up as a mash-up of "Silicon Valley" and a poorly dubbed anime.