Vanessa Formicola

I'm an engineering leader and sociotechnical architect. More than 15 years across companies like Microsoft, ThoughtWorks and Flo Health, including eleven client engagements across industries as varied as fintech, healthcare and government during my time at ThoughtWorks.

I've moved between engineering leadership, from EM through Head of Engineering, hands-on delivery and development, architecture, people growth, coaching and advisory, depending on what the organisation needed. A technical problem is rarely just technical, and a leadership problem is rarely just leadership. The work is untangling the two, and solving what they cause together.

That conviction, tested across enough organisations, and sharpened by the recurring failure patterns I set out in my talk 7 Architectural Sins, became Holistic Engineering (InfoQ), a framework for treating technical and organisational problems as one diagnosis rather than two; it's the subject of talks at QCon London. Social Decision Records grew out of it: a way to give the organisational decisions teams make, and rarely document, the same weight as their technical ones. Working with Matthew Skelton, co-author of Team Topologies, the practice was later extended into a pairing with Team APIs.

I speak at QCon London, DevoxxUK, DevoxxBE, FastFlowConf, JOnTheBeach, Software Architecture Gathering Berlin, OOP Munich and Agile Meets Architecture, and sit on the DevoxxUK Architecture Track programme committee (2025 & 2026). I've written for the InfoQ eMagazine, and I tend to build the communities I work in as much as the frameworks, across knowledge-sharing, technical practice and D&I. I was a panellist on the InfoQ Culture & Methods Trends Report 2026, discussing how AI is changing teams, ways of working and decision-making, a lens I'm now applying more broadly to how AI reshapes engineering organisations: their structure, their decisions, how work actually gets done.