Inclusive spaces for Aotearoa's tech practitioners to connect, grow, and celebrate together.

NZ Tech Rally is a grassroots community run by tech practitioners, for tech practitioners: engineers, developers, QAs, product folks, and tech leaders from across Aotearoa New Zealand.

We run in-person monthly meetups, workshops and an annual tech conference, right here in Wellington, that your whole engineering team can attend together.

In May 2026, more than 400 people from over 100 organisations joined us in Wellington, to hear from our 23 local speakers. Watch our 2026 highlights reel to see what the day looked like.

We are now getting ready for NZ Tech Rally 2027. Call for sponsors and ticket sales are open. We received 162 talk proposals for our 2027 conference and our speaker lineup will be finalised by late October 2026.

Header NZ Tech Rally 2027 conference.
Header NZ Tech Rally 2027 conference.

3 Keynotes & 20 Speakers across 5 tracks:

  • AI, Data & Ethics

  • Testing & Quality

  • Product, Design & UX

  • Engineering & Platforms

  • Community, Culture & Wellbeing

Friday, 7th May 2027 @ Tākina, Wellington Central, NZ

Call for Speakers is now closed. We’ve received 162 talk proposals – Ngā mihi nui/thank you so much!

Our talk selection committee is currently selecting our final 23 speakers for NZ Tech Rally 2027.

Meet our 2027 speakers

Keynote

  • Ramya is a middle-aged Indian woman with brown complexion, shoulder height black hair and black eyes. She is wearing a red top, sitting diagonally and smiling at the camera.

    Ramya Ravishankar

    Lead UX/UI Designer @ Ministry of Education NZ

    A journey to the core of human-centred design

  • Elise Wei

    Software has a human interface

  • Khushi Chauhan

    Technical Product Owner @ NZ Police

    Leading beyond the product: Creating pathways, leading communities, shaping technology culture at NZ Police.

Product, Design & UX

  • Jamie Dawson

    10,000 data points a second, and nobody cared

  • Sailendhran Paramanandhan

    Three startups, no code

  • Emma Buckland

    The hidden risk in mobile UX

  • Name

    Talk title

AI, Data & Ethics

  • David Curlewis

    Lines of code got a better publicist

  • Maria McMillan

    Why AI won’t fix your broken IA

  • Chris Cormack

    He ao anō tēnei / A different world

  • Indira Bandari

    The ethics review nobody wanted to attend

Engineering & Platforms

  • Zanda Zvidrina

    I debugged software better than my life

  • Francis Ho

    Scope down to scale up- Lessons from agentic AI adoption

  • Alix Klingenberg

    Refactoring everything everywhere all at once: Safety A/B testing in single-tenant SaaS

  • Jakub Jurkiewicz

    What I got wrong about executives

Testing & Quality

  • TBC

  • TBC

  • TBC

  • TBC

Community, Culture & Wellbeing

  • Vivian Chandra

    Beyond the algorithm: designing technology for trust, safety, and connection

  • Thalia Kehoe Rowden

    Do human rights exist online?

  • Bianca Grizhar

    Detangling ourselves from big tech

  • Luca Zampese

    Health tech needs a reset

Meet our 2027 crew