Sharon Gorla is an Engineering Leader and Enterprise Architect with more than 16 years of experience building large-scale platforms across retail, eCommerce, and enterprise software. She currently serves as an Engineer Lead and member of Starbucks Technology's AI Champions group, where she has helped modernize customer and in-store platforms while exploring how AI can be thoughtfully integrated into enterprise engineering systems.

Throughout her career, Sharon has focused on designing architectures that outlast individual technologies. At Starbucks, she helped architect the modernization of the company's GraphQL orchestration layer for the Next Gen POS initiative, contributed to a patented multi-channel transaction platform, and led enterprise efforts around GraphQL, federation, reusable platform capabilities, and API modernization. She also founded Starbucks' GraphQL Community of Practice, bringing together engineers across 12 teams to share standards, mentor one another, and build a culture of technical excellence.

A frequent speaker at industry conferences and engineering events, Sharon enjoys exploring the intersection of platform engineering, software architecture, and AI. Her work centers on semantic APIs, orchestration layers, developer experience, and the architectural principles that remain valuable as technologies evolve from mobile and cloud to today's AI agents and copilots.

More than any particular technology, Sharon is passionate about building platforms that put people first. Whether improving the day-to-day experience of developers, enabling frontline employees, or helping organizations navigate change, she believes the best architectures are those that create lasting value for the people who build, operate, and use them.