Annie Vella is a Distinguished Engineer at Westpac New Zealand, where she focuses on AI adoption, governing agentic systems at scale, and transforming the software development lifecycle. With over 20 years of experience across startups, scale-ups, and large enterprises in four countries, she has spent two decades on both sides of the engineer/manager pendulum — and actively encourages others to do the same. Having fallen in love with computers when she got her first Commodore 64 at age six, Annie has cared deeply about the craft ever since. That curiosity led to a Master's of Engineering exploring how professional software engineers experience the impact of AI coding assistants. Through her writing and speaking, Annie's aim is to help engineers and leaders find joy and pride in the work ahead.