Shannon Eldridge-Kuehn

Principal, AHEAD

Shannon Eldridge-Kuehn is a Principal at AHEAD with a passion for translating technical complexity into business clarity. With deep expertise across cloud architecture, FinOps, and platform engineering, she helps enterprises modernize infrastructure, optimize spend, and scale securely. A self-taught technologist and relentless advocate for accessibility in tech, Shannon bridges the gap between engineering and execution; empowering teams to move fast without losing control.

She’s a speaker, mentor, and occasional disruptor who believes curiosity is a career accelerator and governance doesn’t have to be boring. Originally hailing from Lincoln, Nebraska, Shannon has been a permanent fixture in the Chicagoland area for over 20 years and lives in a western suburb with her family.

UPCOMING TALK

Full Stack Digital Transformation: Engineering Change from the Ground Up

Many organizations still believe that moving to the cloud is digital transformation. In reality, it’s just one layer of a much larger, more complex journey. True transformation requires a full-stack approach: modernizing infrastructure, evolving application architecture, embedding automation, improving observability, optimizing costs, and driving cultural change across teams.

In this talk, Shannon Eldridge-Kuehn will guide you through the layered architecture of digital transformation, breaking down each stage from infrastructure and networking to application modernization, FinOps, and cultural alignment. Drawing on real-world experiences from large-scale transformation projects, Shannon will share the successes, failures, and lessons learned that turn strategy into lasting results.

Whether you’re a technical leader, architect, or engineer, you’ll walk away with a practical blueprint for engineering change from the ground up, along with a clear understanding of why cloud is just the beginning.