Shama Keskar is a three-time founding CTO. But that is not where the story started.

She got into tech through the back door 🙂 Physics graduate. No CS degree. First job in the United States was cashier at a Big 5 sporting goods store in Silicon Valley. Broke into Google in 2004 as a QA engineer.

Then spent the next 15+ years scaling engineering across Google, LinkedIn, and Amazon – leading quality for Google's Online Advertising platform (scope: ~98% of company revenue), pioneering Alexa automation, launching Amazon Go and Amazon One as Amazon's first physical retail launches. Grew teams from 4 to 50+ engineers.

In 2021 she went founding CTO. And has not stopped since – Nickelytics (edge AI + computer vision for autonomous outdoor advertising), SignAI (real-time bidirectional ASL/English AI interpreter prototype demoed to Microsoft), and most recently co-founder & founding CTO of an AI-native fashion wholesale platform where she built the production document extraction system that hit 96% accuracy across live paying merchants.

Currently writing her first book The Trust Layer – building AI systems you can actually ship. Her thesis is simple – generation is solved, trust is the product. She writes about it publicly on Substack and speaks on it wherever engineering leaders will let her.

The through-line from QA engineer at Google to three-time founding CTO has always been the same – care about the boring engineering work everyone else skips. Evals, reliability, trust architecture, et al. Ship things that actually work in production.

Based in Seattle. Available for keynotes, panels, closed-door founder sessions, and technical deep-dives.