Expedia Group is proud to have Candice Tang, Vice President of Developer Experience Platforms, speaking at the 2024 Lesbians Who Tech & Allies Summit in New York, September 17-20^th. As the world’s largest LGBTQ+ professional community, Lesbians Who Tech & Allies is paving the way for visibility, intersectionality, and positive change for LGBTQ+ women, women of color, and nonbinary leaders.

 Her session, entitled “Optimizing Platforms: Enhancing Performance and Innovation in Travel Tech“, will explore how we are optimizing our travel technology platforms to boost performance and drive innovation.  Read on to learn more about Candice, her work, and passion for Inclusion & Diversity.

Can you tell us about background, and your journey to Expedia Group?

My family and I are from Trinidad & Tobago. We immigrated to the New York City when I was 3 years old. Growing up we made it a priority to travel to visit our extended family. We spent holidays and summers in Trinidad, the Cayman Islands, Atlanta and Texas. Those are some of the best childhood experiences and memories to look back on. I graduated from Baruch College in New York with a degree in Operations Management and a minor in Music, and after an internship with Sony Music I was hired to be a technical account manager in their digital music distribution department. I spent 8 years at Sony in various roles where my teams played a crucial role in defining and developing new processes and systems to support the digital supply chain, and it’s where I learned I had a deep passion for people leadership.

In 2013, I moved to Portland, Oregon for a new role as Sr. Manager of digital support with Nike. Nike was in the midst of multiple digital transformations including, a strategic shift from being a primarily wholesale led business to a digital and direct to consumer business. At the same time, they were migrating their legacy monolith tech stack from being hosted in an on premise data center to the cloud. I spent almost 10 years at Nike and in my various roles, I evangelized DevOps best practices and a Site Reliability Engineering culture that enabled developers to ship with speed, confidence and reliability. I was able to grow a small team of 50 vendor support resources to a team of 250 FTEs distributed across North America, India and EMEA, but the role I was most proud of was Founder of the Black Employees in Technology employee resource group. Being one of three Black leaders in Tech, I could feel the need for more community amongst this small but mighty group. We launched 3 pillars focused on Culture, Community and Career and created an awesome network of resources that gave this underrepresented group a voice and platform to drive and own their careers.

I joined Expedia Group in September 2022 because I saw an opportunity to have a positive impact in the traveler and developer experience. I was impressed by the innovation, technology and platform first strategy at Expedia Group as well as the clear investment in Inclusion & Diversity.

What do you focus on in your role at EG, and what makes it exciting?

In my current role as VP of Developer Experience & Runtime Platforms, I lead the team of platform engineers focused on providing capabilities that power the end to end developer journey. This includes the Developer Front Door aka Backstage, Delivery Platforms that power our CI/CD pipelines, Developer Support, EDGE engineering and the Runtime Compute platforms that roughly 80% of our traveler experiences run on today.

I love that the work we do serves the developer community. They are so crucial to the traveler and partner platform experience and often they are working in extremely complex environments. Cognitive load and context switching is high in this environment and can diminish developers ability to focus on producing high quality code. Our team is passionate about identifying friction in the experience and working to remove it or streamline it. We believe that the work we do to improve the developer platforms ultimately impacts the quality of life for our developers and enables them ship better code to the traveler.

What motivated you to attend and speak at the 2024 Lesbians Who Tech summit?

When I was growing up, I could have never imagined a platform of this magnitude that speaks to so many parts of my personal identity and experience. I often struggled to find representation during my professional journey. Conferences like the LWT Summit give the LGBTQIA+ community in technology a platform to connect, network and see the art of the possible in the stories of others.

How do you see the role of women, women of color, and nonbinary leaders evolving in the tech space?

Things have really improved since I first began my professional career almost 20 years ago. I can remember so many meetings where I was often the only female or person of color or person who identifies as LGBTQ+ in the room. There were several meetings where at the end of a meeting, whether I was leading it or not, I was expected to send the notes. Now I find myself sitting at the table with people from different backgrounds, cultures and identities where conversations and traditional ways of thinking are often challenged in a positive way that moves us forward.

I am grateful that I have been a part of this evolution and for other leaders who are intentional about rooting diversity, equity and inclusion in their hiring practices and are committed to identifying and removing bias in their team culture. It is not easy to do and it’s something we have to constantly keep in our consciousness to avoid falling into old patterns and habits.

What makes EG a great place to work for Underrepresented Identities?

I have been at Expedia Group for 2 years. I work in a remote role and when I was onboarding I felt anxious about being able to find a community here. Discovering the wide variety of IBGs available and all of the resources they provide gave me peace of mind and helped me start to build relationships I needed to feel like I belong. My favorite event so far was last year’s Afrotech conference in Austin. The event and BEAM teams did an amazing job curating an inviting set of events that were welcoming and authentic to conference goers. I am looking forward to continuing to be a champion and sponsor for our IBG networks and communities.

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