Steve Neely

"I love Steve. He's hilarious." - Michael McIntyre

[source]

Cartoon portrait of Steve Neely

Software engineering leader focused on building high-performing teams that deliver at scale. Deep technical expertise, a commitment to continuous improvement, and an empathetic, collaborative nature underpin a leadership approach centered on clarity and accountability. At Splunk, my work spans AI transformation, engineering productivity, and a Kubernetes-based platform supporting a global footprint of services.

Capabilities

Engineering leadership, product delivery, technical systems, and academic depth.

Engineering Leadership

  • Building high-performing teams
  • Empowering product development organizations
  • Creating clarity and accountability
  • Coaching, facilitation, and agile leadership

Delivery at Scale

  • Roadmap planning and execution
  • Portfolio planning
  • Software delivery metrics
  • Product management partnership

Technical Systems

  • Large-scale SaaS platforms
  • Systems architecture at scale
  • Distributed systems
  • Continuous improvement and reliability practices

Academic Foundation

  • PhD in Computer Science
  • Programming languages
  • Artificial intelligence
  • Pervasive computing and sensor systems

Career & Education

A brief timeline of leadership roles, product work, and academic foundation.

Current

Splunk

Leading the Splunk Cloud Platform, a Kubernetes-based PaaS for services running at global scale across AWS, GCP, and Azure.

2018-2020

Unsupervised

VP Engineering, pushing the boundaries of AI by using unsupervised learning to discover business-transforming patterns in data.

2017-2020

Apto

VP of Engineering, leading the architectural transformation from a bespoke Salesforce application to a service-oriented platform for high-velocity startup experimentation.

2010-2016

Rally Software / CA Technologies

Engineering director, building industry-transforming agile software and leading through Rally's growth, successful IPO, and acquisition by CA Technologies.

2003-2008

University Research & Teaching

Lecturer, research fellow, and post-doctoral fellow in distributed systems, emerging Web technologies, programming languages, databases, and pervasive computing.

1994-2003

Computer Science Education

PhD at University of Strathclyde, BSc (Hons) at University of Glasgow, and an exchange year at UC Berkeley.

Selected Writing

Short archived notes on leadership, communication, metrics, and management craft.

Manager Readme

A working note on expectations, communication, meetings, 1:1s, and how I try to show up as a leader.

Publications

Academic posters, conference material, invited talks, and podcast appearances.

Posters & Miscellany

  • Steve Neely, Matthew Stabeler and Paddy Nixon "SensorMash: Exploring System Fidelity through Sensor Mashup." Poster at 6th International Conference Pervasive Computing, Sydney, Australia, May 2008.
  • Steve Neely, Graham Williamson, Hui Zhang, Graeme Stevenson and Simon Dobson "Location Detection with Smart Zigbee Sensors." Poster at The 2nd Workshop on Wireless Sensor Networks Research in Ireland (WiSen 2007), Ireland, June 2007.
  • Graeme Stevsonson, Lorcan Coyle, Steve Neely, Simon Dobson and Paddy Nixon "Construct -- A Decentralised Context Infrastructure for Ubiquitou Computing Environments." IT&T Annual Conference, Cork Institute of Technology, Ireland, 2005.

Invited Talks and Presentations

  • Steve Neely and Steve Stolt "Continuous Delivery? Easy! Just change everything. (Well, maybe it isn't that easy)" at Agile 2013, Nashville, TN, August 2013.
  • Steve Neely and Steve Stolt "Continuous Delivery? It's Easy! Just change all your engineering practices" at RallyON 2013, Boulder, CO, May 2013.
  • Ryan Martens and Steve Neely "Developing Quality in 1 Week or Less," the BMC DevOps Leadership Podcast, December 2012.
  • Steve Neely "Culture of Quality: Move Fast and Break Things" at Boulder Resilience Engineering the Web (BREW).
  • Steve Neely and Ryan Scott "Culture of Quality - Behavior & Test Driven Development" at RallyON 2012, Boulder, CO, May 2012.

Research Archive

Earlier research interests and academic community work.

Interests

Agile methodologies, software development, leading multiple agile teams, roadmap planning and execution, portfolio planning, software delivery metrics, product management, coaching, facilitation, distributed systems, SaaS platforms, systems architecture at scale, programming languages, artificial intelligence, sensor systems, and pervasive and ubiquitous computing.

Conference and Workshop Organisation

Program Committee Membership

Professional Affiliations