Women in Tech presents: Roo Tech Showcase December 2024
Discover the inspiring achievements of Deliveroo’s Women in Tech ERG, where our women in technology, from Software Engineers to Product Managers, share their innovative projects through engaging lightning talks. Join us as we celebrate diversity and empowerment in tech, featuring insights from eight remarkable speakers.
The Women in Tech Employee Resource Group (ERG) at Deliveroo was officially founded in 2023, and we are proud to represent an amazing community of female employees who identify as working in Tech at Deliveroo. This includes, but is not limited to, Software Engineers, Data Scientists, Designers, and Product Managers and we also welcome those who want to move into a Tech role. We host many events and initiatives throughout the year that align with our mission to connect and empower women in technology to excel in their careers at Deliveroo and beyond.
For our main end-of-year event, we chose to showcase some of the wonderful projects our female employees achieved last year, in the form of 5-minute lightning talks. Our VP of Engineering, Vaughn Washington, opened the event with a message about the importance of our ERG and events like these, which provide underrepresented groups a forum to showcase their achievements. In continuation of this spirit, we are very excited to be publishing this post on our tech blog for more people to discover our eight remarkable female speakers and their innovative ideas. Enjoy!
Olga Afanasieva, Product Manager
My name is Olga, I’ve been at Deliveroo about 3.5 years and mostly looked after Consumer Search and Recommendations. During the event I shared with the team my journey of building a Proof of Concept (POC) of an app that could help couples evaluate their relationship, facilitate feedback exchange and help them nurture the relationship. I’ve built that POC with my husband and a certified couple therapist while I was on maternity leave and managed to test it with 15 couples.
Rabia Lakhani, Product Manager
I’m Rabia and I am a product manager in the Consumer New Verticals team looking after the browsing, upsell and basket experience for our customers. I joined Deliveroo as a Technical Programme Manager and around 12 months ago, started my official journey into the Product world. I wanted to share my personal transition story on how I navigated the internal mobility journey at Deliveroo and took advantage of the opportunities I was presented with to carve my career path.
Shan Sun, Tax Technology Lead
I am Shan Sun - Product Owner of Tax Engineering and Artefacts in Financial Systems. I joined Deliveroo in June 2022 responsible for delivery of both tax regulatory requirements and partner invoicing related solutions.
My project Sea Angels was made as part of an art installation showcased at the Electromagnetic Field festival in 2024. This project combines 3D printing, geospatial data analysis, and electronic engineering to visually represent some of the most significant lighthouses around the world. The final installation features LED lights that flash in sync with the actual sequences of the real-life lighthouses, creating a captivating and dynamic visual experience.
Connie Reinholdsson, Software Engineer
I’m Connie and I’m an Android Engineer in the Loyalty Team. I joined Deliveroo almost four years ago and have since worked on a range of features on the Loyalty Team, as well as many platform improvements on the Android Consumer App. I shared an Android-wide initiative to improve our annual Android version adoption process. The initiative aims to put more structure and collaboration in place to help the Android teams adopt the new version and is something I am implementing in 2025.
Laura Soto Miranda, Product Designer
I’m Laura, a Staff Product Designer at Deliveroo working in the design systems team. I joined four years ago, and my very first task was to improve the colour foundations of our products. During my talk, I shared my journey with colours, the importance of colour accessibility and how it can drive business growth.
Accessibility isn’t boring, it is about making things better for everyone and it has also proven good for business. Small changes like these can make a huge impact, and our colour experiment proved that by making colours accessible, we observed exceptionally strong results in driving business growth. The metrics below are statistically significant and annualised:
+0.28% Order Volume Growth +0.29% User Gross transaction value +0.52% User Profit
Lula Leus, Software Engineer
I am Lula, a Senior Software Engineer in the Trust team. I joined Delivery fairly recently—just four months ago, in September 2024. My talk focused on how I utilise Microsoft Copilot in my daily work within Deliveroo Engineering. The features of Copilot, I demonstrated, included: Understanding the unfamiliar codebase with Copilot Chat Faster coding with inline auto-complete Multi-file, conversation-driven code edits with Copilot Edits Quick and easy command-line assistance using inline Copilot Chat in the terminal Auto-generated commit messages for convenience
Vishmi Money, Software Engineer
I’m Vishmi, a Software Engineer in the Partner Lifecycle team and I have been in Deliveroo for three years. My talk was about a solution for centralising partner user data across Deliveroo systems. The proposed service is called partner-users which acts as the source of truth for all partner user data including their contact details, associations to sites and organisations, access, permissions, preferences and other metadata. I shared the details about current limitations, how the proposed solution solves these problems, the designed system architecture for this service, the consumers of this service with possible use cases, what we’ve delivered so far and what comes next.
Isabel Costa, Software Engineer
I’m Isabel and I’m a Software Engineer in the New Verticals Consumer Growth team. I’ve been at Deliveroo for 2.5 years. My talk was about how we’ve used Shadow Testing to understand how our systems would perform during the Black Friday campaigns. The focus was on how we tested performance of a new type of carousel, focused on items instead of partners, which we’ve displayed on the home page to showcase our Black Friday offers across multiple partners (e.g: items ranging from perfumes to airpods). The challenge here was around carousel displaying on our home feed page (the most visited page across platforms), a service that was about to experience this new level of traffic and all the impacted services used to serve the item carousel. I explained the shadow test roll out process, which involved coordination across 5 teams, and how we implemented this under real consumer traffic. In the end, we’ve got good insights and learnings out of it: a bug we found ahead of time, a service that required additional scaling to cope with new traffic levels, and how we managed to implement the feature without impacting home feed response latency.
As well as hearing from our speakers, we were excited to officially launch our ‘Guide to Transitioning into Tech Careers’ at our end-of-year event, featuring insights and advice from women across Tech roles at Deliveroo. We’ll be continuing to grow the reach of the guide in the coming months, and are working on an initiative in 2025 to support more women making the move into Tech.
Thanks to the enthusiasm and support from our community and to all the wonderful speakers, the event was a big success. Those who attended told us they found the stories inspiring, the speakers passionate, and that they’d love to come to more events. So we’re excited to say that we’re making the Roo Tech Showcase a yearly event and we’ve already started planning other great events for 2025! Watch this space.
If you are interested in joining us in Tech, please go to deliveroo.com/careers. - we’d love to hear from you.
About Olga Afanasieva
I’m a Product Manager in Consumer org. Have 15+ years of experience in Product, mostly in B2C space. Outside work, I am a mum of two wonderful kinds, a runner and a hiker.
About Rabia Lakhani
I’m a Staff Product Manager looking after the product strategy and execution of basket building, personalisation and upsell experience for grocery and retail partners. I’ve been working in tech for 10+ years and have a consulting background where I supported various strategic transformation projects - having experience from strategy to implementation helping them move up the Digital maturity curve. Outside of work, I travel the world in search of good food and mountains to climb. I’m also working towards improving my proficiency in Mandarin.
About Shan Sun
I’m a Tax Technology Lead at Deliveroo, bridging the gap between the Tax Function and the FS Technology Tax Engineering Product team. My background spans econometrics, accounting, and tax, forming a strong foundation for my work in Tax Technology—a dynamic field merging tax law with data and technology. I actively participating in the PyData communities and contributing to the education of future tax advisors through my professional governing body - the Chartered Institute of Taxation. Outside of work, I enjoy tinkering with 3D printing, electronics, and sewing, as well as diving and reading manga.
About Connie Reinholdsson
I’m a Software Engineer in the Loyalty Team at Deliveroo. I have worked on android development for over six years and I am passionate about accessibility and driving technical improvements. I have presented a number of technical talks at various android meet-ups including Droidcon and Londroid. In my free time, I love finding new brunch spots, running and exploring the world with my toddler.
About Laura Soto Miranda
I’m a Staff product designer working in Design systems at Deliveroo. I have 18 years of experience as a designer, 8 them fully focused in building and scaling design systems and spreading awareness on accessibility. I love nature walks with my husband, good coffee, my dog Ringo and doing yoga – I even have a 200 hr certification
About Lula Leus
I am a Senior Software Engineer in Trust team at Deliveroo. I have 10+ years of professional experience in the industry. I love Go, and in addition to working with it at Deliveroo, I am a co-organizer of the Women Who Go London meetups. My main interests outside of work are hiking and urban walks with my soulmate/husband of many years—and history. At the moment, Viking Age is my particular obsession.
About Vishmi Money
I am a Senior Software Engineer in the Restaurants Group at Deliveroo. I primarily focus on backend software development and am passionate about areas such as Distributed systems, Machine Learning and Data Science. I love nature and music and am a sitarist and a vocalist. In my spare time, you will find me going on hikes and walks, or enjoying and playing music with my husband and daughter.
About Isabel Costa
I’m a Senior Software Engineer focused on backend development in the New Verticals Consumer group at Deliveroo. I’m passionate about giving back to the community through mentoring, and I’m an Open Source enthusiast. Outside of tech, I’m really interested in Cinema and Martial Arts.