From UWA to Silicon Valley

Cameron Fitzgerald graduated from UWA Software Engineering in 2014 and spent the following decade in San Francisco. At Google he built distributed systems behind products used by billions, including Google Lens. He moved to Stripe to work on monetisation, and now leads engineering work at Anthropic.

The conversation covered the jump from Perth to Silicon Valley, what those three companies are actually like from the inside, building for scale versus building for speed, how an Australian engineer breaks into SF, and the advice he wishes he'd had at 22.

It closed with an open Q&A with students, which is generally where the useful part of these evenings happens.