RJ Lindelof
Speaking
I speak to engineering leaders, executives, and investors about what happens after the AI demo: governance, verification, cost, and the people who have to make it work on Monday.
Every talk is built from production experience in regulated B2B SaaS, with real numbers and the company names attached. Keynote, fireside chat, panel, workshop, or podcast: tell me the audience and the format and I will tell you honestly whether I am the right speaker. No slides full of stock photos of robots shaking hands.
Topics
For engineering leaders, CTOs, product executives
How an AI-native SDLC works when it is production infrastructure instead of a pilot: AI as pipeline stages with guardrails, and the results it produced, including a 5x deploy-frequency lift and code coverage from under 10% to 40%. Takeaways: why adoption is a behavior and trust problem, what to baseline before the first tool is turned on, and why adoption percentage is the wrong success metric.
For engineering managers, architects, QA leaders
AI speeds up coding, and then review, QA, and backlog grooming choke. A theory-of-constraints look at where the bottleneck goes and what to do about it. Takeaways: why review should get slower and more expensive on purpose, how QA and product teams learn to generate test suites, and why AI made judgment the whole job for senior engineers.
For CTOs, CISOs, risk leaders, boards
Agentic AI in HIPAA and SOC 2 environments. Your auditor is going to ask who approved the change. Takeaways: humans own merges, a workable responsible-AI policy for regulated teams, multi-model design with no single-vendor dependency, and how a 90% cut in LLM inference cost was found.
For executives and distributed companies
Lessons from leading hybrid teams since 2006 and fully distributed global teams since 2012, including growing one engineering organization from 30 to 175+. Takeaways: one organization instead of a vendor at the far end of a ticket queue, one name on every decision, and the difference between "needs to know" and "needs to sit in a meeting."
For general business and leadership audiences
A keynote on how executive leadership has to evolve as business becomes more digital: remote team management, AI integration, and building resilient organizational cultures. It draws on decades of scaling organizations and leading distributed teams, and it ends with practical steps rather than predictions.
Past talks
Most of my speaking has happened in rooms where a decision was on the line, not on a conference stage. That is where the material above was tested.
If you want a speaker with forty conference logos, I am not that speaker. If you want one who has done the thing in the title of the talk, keep reading.
Writing
Publication
A 400+ page technical guide to AI-assisted software development covering Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Cursor, and emerging AI development tools. Production-ready patterns for context management, prompt engineering, agent frameworks, MCP servers, and prompt caching, with documented metrics showing 30-55% faster implementation.
Read the guide on RJL.pub (external) →Articles
Regular writing on AI governance, platform modernization, and distributed teams. Recent pieces include "AI Codes, Engineers Build Software," "Prompt engineering is the old conversation," "AI adoption in engineering is not a tooling rollout," and "Your auditor is going to ask who approved the change."
Read RJ's posts on LinkedIn →Long-form
Longer essays, including "Who Signs for Agent-Written Code?" and an operating guide on AI-assisted delivery built around one idea: authoring got cheap and verification is the constraint.
Read the essays on RJL.ai (external) →Also on the record: an earlier publication, Responsive Web Design with jQuery. It is listed for completeness and because the title dates me with some precision. More of that in the outtakes.
Ventures
BestJob.work is a remote work platform I founded in 2018 that connects professionals with distributed teams across the United States. It features transparent compensation benchmarked to market rates, unlimited PTO, equity participation, and AI-powered screening, with 99.1% remote employees and a 163% growth rate. Visit BestJob.work (external site).
For organizers
To book, send the event name, date, audience, and format through the contact form and choose "Speaking engagement" as the topic. The more specific the request, the more useful the reply.
Event, date, audience, format. That is all the first message needs.
