I care a lot about building things that are thoughtful with people’s time, attention, and energy.

I’m a technical product and engineering leader with 10+ years in software. I’ve led engineering teams, taken real ownership of messy internal systems and AI initiatives, and spent a lot of time in the unglamorous, messy middle (my favorite!) figuring out why things break, get slow, or exhaust the people using them.

Over the last few years, I’ve worked as an executive coach for engineers, PMs, and founders. This experience changed how I see organizations. It gave me a front-row seat to where work actually gets stuck. (Un)surprisingly, it's not in the tech itself, but in unclear ownership, misaligned objectives, and communication that has fallen to the wayside.

That perspective has made me sharper about trust, partnership, and how real decisions actually get made.

My free time consists of learning to hip hop dance (still terrible but still having fun, thanks for asking!) and weightlifting. I have a strong affinity for wigs. My favorite will always be when I dressed up as Estelle from the Golden Girls.

Sarah Ing

Learn Build Share

I work with teams and individuals to help them share what they know with others. I help teams build their external reputation, making it easier to hire and retain people.

I offer the following services: 

💡 LEARN: Providing training through workshops and talks on public speaking, writing, event organising, outreach and management skills. 

🚀 BUILD: Working with teams to build their outreach and evangelism initiatives, to get teams teaching each other and sharing what they know with the community. 

📣 SHARE: Help individuals with 1:1 speaker coaching and mentoring, as well as weekly advice through my newsletter on Seckington.com.

Speaker Coaching + Employee Evangelism + Workshop Facilitator | Founder

Container Solutions

As the Senior Engineering Manager, I managed all the Engineering Managers and work closely with our VP of Engineering to help run the engineer management team on a day to day basis. I set the overall direction of the Engineering Management team, planning out our team goals, and initiatives to improve our engineering culture and business goals. I am responsible for managing & mentoring individual engineering managers, supporting their professional development and performance and career progression, and helping them become better managers.

Senior Engineering Manager

As an Engineering Manager at Container Solutions, I joined the team to manage cloud native engineers, and help improve management processes. Since joining I've been involved in setting up the engineering culture OKRs, improving the onboarding process, planning out the engineering management offsite and setting up scrum for the EM team.

Engineering Manager

Wikimedia Foundation

The Developer Advocacy team empowers and advocates for technical volunteers to contribute to the wider Wikimedia movement. The team is responsible for developing initiatives & projects to explore, learn, build, maintain and grow their skills and technical projects, collaborating with other teams, communities, and individuals. 

As the manager of the Developer Advocacy team, I lead a cross-functional team of Developer Advocates, Technical Writers and a Technical Community Program Manager. I am responsible for setting the goals and strategy of the team, supporting their day-to-day work, as well as improving team processes, such as hiring and onboarding.

Developer Advocacy Manager

FutureLearn

Engineering Manager at FutureLearn - a social learning platform backed by the Open University offering courses from a wide range of universities and cultural institutions. Since our launch in 2013, we’ve run hundreds of courses that have attracted over 16 million learners to our platform. 

As an Engineering Manager, I am responsible for managing individual engineers, supporting their professional development, performance and career progression, helping them set goals, and encouraging them to have a healthy work/life balance (especially now that we're mostly remote). As part of the EM team, I'm responsible for developing and evolving the necessary structures to support engineers in our wider Tech Team: running & refining our hiring & onboarding processes, our salary reviews, succession planning and career development initiatives. 

I currently lead our Tech Team outreach, encouraging engineers to share what they know through blogging, public speaking and volunteering, and our internal learning initiatives, like organising internal training, and other opportunities to share and learn from each other.

Developer and line manager at FutureLearn, a social learning platform backed by the Open University offering free courses from a wide range of university partners, and cultural institutions like the British Council, British Library and British Museum. I initially joined the team as a Ruby on Rails developer, helping build features on both the learner facing and partner facing side. 

Since June 2014, I've also led the team's employee evangelism, encouraging our entire team to share what they do with the tech and design community. In 2015, I started line managing a few people, alongside being a developer and the evangelism lead.

Developer & Line Manager & Evangelism Lead

Geeks of London

Co-founder of an event management company that runs free-to-attend events in London, like BarCamp and Hackdays. BarCamps are large unconferences that yearly attract over 200 enthusiastic technologists that share knowledge and collaborate on new projects. I have been involved in BarCampLondon 6-10, HackCamp, LinkedGov Data HackCamp, env[:hack] and 2 GeekTrips.

Founder & Event Organizer

MissGeeky.com

In 2007 I founded MissGeeky.com, a blog about all things geeky. Since then it has grown to a readership of 25,000 per month. I am often invited to cover tech conferences, movie screenings and press conferences, and have participated in multiple online conference call interviews.

Blogger

Unboxed Consulting

Developer

EmberAds Ltd

EmberAds received funding in 2011 after having been developed internally at PizzaPowered for almost 6 months. As one of the co-founders I was involved in most aspects of the strategy for the company, and as developer I was mainly focused on the machine learning algorithms.

Founder & Developer

Pizza Powered

After winning CharityHack 2010 by producing a proof of concept of CharityBox - a social browser extension for donating to charity - we decided to start a company as a team and focus on a few projects that we had all been wanting to work on for a while.

PizzaPowered spun off EmberAds at the end of 2011.

Founder & Web Developer

Education Made Easy

Focusing on supporting educators in the creation and management of digital courses. Providing a solution of on-site lecture recording and integrated viewing software.

Founder

Do you want to improve your speaking skills? 

Maybe you've never given a talk before and you don't know where to start or don't know what to talk about. Maybe you have given talks before but you want to go from good to great. Maybe you've done internal presentations before, but you've never done a conference talk before.

Everyone has a brilliant story waiting inside of them, you just need some help to make it happen. 

Or maybe you're looking to build your engineering team's external reputation? Having your team blog more, speak at events, and host their own events is the best way to showcase what you do as a team, especially if you're looking to grow and scale. 

I work with engineers, engineering leaders and engineering teams to build their reputation in the tech community, by helping create great internal developer experiences and teaching the skills developers and managers need to contribute to this.

We’ll work together to identify what areas you want to improve and change! My workshops and 1:1s are designed specifically to what you and your team need, blending bespoke exercises, frameworks and training with direct support and guidance. 

Combining my experience in storytelling and engineering, you’ll learn how to make sure your content resonates effectively with your audience and share engaging stories!

I’ve been a conference speaker myself for almost 10 years, but I used to be TERRIFIED of public speaking. I’ve since then developed frameworks and techniques to help others improve their speaking skills. I love that I now can help other speakers discover what they love about giving talks 💖

I got into all of this because I used to be both a blogger and an event organiser. When I joined FutureLearn as an engineer in 2013, I realised our team should be sharing what we were doing with the tech community, and I could help them through my past experiences! I kept on leading on evangelism and outreach when I switched to doing engineering management, and I feel these activities complement each other: it’s all about helping people to grow and encouraging them to learn from and share with others. 

I've now got over 10 years experience of working with and managing teams of developers and managers and helping them with their evangelism and outreach.

I’ve also got a blog and newsletter on Seckington.com where you can find my latest articles on all things public speaking, engineering management and employee evangelism! 

Want to work with me? Drop me an email at melinda@seckington.com to discuss what you're looking for.

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The Battle

Sarah Ing

Melinda Seckington

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