Grace Francisco is the Vice President of Developer Relations Strategy & Experience at Cisco, focused on building a broad-based developer strategy for Cisco and creating new capabilities for DevOps, Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) and cloud architects in support of cloud native architectures. In her role she leads Cisco DevNet, Cisco’s 500,000+ developer community and program, which catalyzes innovations and accelerates automation and digital transformation in the industry.

Grace is a seasoned Developer Relations leader with more than 15 years of experience across enterprise, small business, fintech, consumer, and gaming. She started her career as a software engineer at Lotus/IBM and then continued on to a variety of early-stage startups. She eventually found herself at Microsoft as a developer evangelist for their first offering of enterprise developer tools. This was the start of a long career specializing in developer relations. She went on to lead developer relations at Intuit, Yodlee, Atlassian, Roblox, and MongoDB.

Grace has led multiple volunteer-driven diversity initiatives throughout her career. She served as co-chair for Women@Microsoft Silicon Valley, launched a diversity speaker series and a peer mentoring program to enable and empower more women in the tech field. Her story can be read on the Techies Project.

Grace is frequently sought out for her deep expertise in developer relations. She has served as an advisor for Startup BootCamp and several early-stage startups.

Grace graduated cum laude and holds a BBA in Business Management from Golden Gate University. She also serves on the board of the Drupal Association and is the co-author of 3 patents.