We're normalising rooms full of technical women
She Bytes Back is a 3,600+ community of experienced women engineers across software, AI and machine learning, platform and backend, product engineering and technical leadership brought together through technical events and curated experiences.
Most of us know the feeling of walking into a technical room and immediately starting to count the women. So we built the room we wanted to walk into instead.
How it started
Our founder, Amber Shand, studied Economics and Accounting before making a career change into tech. During the pandemic she learned to code, went on to teach with Code First Girls, and spent years as a software engineer most recently at Skyscanner.
She started She Bytes Back because she saw a massive gap between the support she got to break into tech and the support once she was actually in it. It began as a simple newsletter about imposter syndrome, then grew into events to empower women in tech alongside BRAVE on Stage, her public speaking programme, and keynotes and workshops on visibility and confidence.
Then, in 2026, she saw the community needed more than general empowerment especially with the rise of AI. The women in AI spaces springing up were aimed at non-technical women. There was nothing equivalent for the engineers actually building it. So she made it.
She Bytes Back doubled down and became what it is now: genuinely technical AI events for women engineers, plus the wider community and experiences around them. Today Amber has delivered 100+ keynotes and built events with Figma, Canva, Synthesia, incident.io and more.
What we believe
1) Technical events can have vibes (and we prove it every time!)
We resisted building technical events at first. Pre-AI, technical talks had to be so specific that you'd fracture the room e.g. a talk on React Native does nothing for a Python engineer three seats over. Yet, AI changed that. Suddenly every engineer, whatever their stack, is wrestling with the same questions so for the first time you can put a genuinely technical conversation in front of a whole room and have all of them actually get it and find it useful.
2) A room where women engineers are the whole room is a different thing
Not a women in tech event with a sprinkle engineers in it (although we still love them!). A technical room that happens to be full of women who have been doing the work for years.
3) Who's in the room matters more than how many
Ok, we LOVE a group pic filled with as many of you as possible. But we genuinely curate every room for experience and relevance, so you're in conversation with people doing work like yours.
4) Breaking in is hard and staying is even harder
There's a lot of support to help women get into tech, and far less to help them grow, lead and be heard once they're there. We're here for the second part.