Julie Gunderson began her public work in Boise, writing feature stories for the Boise Weekly and leading workshops for the city's young professionals. In 2016, while relationships and community manager at Taos, she brought DevOpsDays to her hometown, assembling the organizing team and recruiting the speakers for the first DevOpsDays Boise. She co-organized the conference through its full run, from 2016 to 2023. She also served on the all-volunteer organizing team of DeliveryConf, a not-for-profit conference on continuous integration and continuous delivery held in Seattle in 2020.
At PagerDuty, Gremlin and Amazon Web Services she worked as a developer and reliability advocate. Her talks kept returning to the same question: what happens to people when systems fail? She spoke on the psychology of chaos engineering, reducing trauma in production, blameless postmortems and why organizations “can't buy DevOps.” With Ana Margarita Medina she presented Don't Forget the Humans, a talk on burnout and the human cost of reliability work. She also led AI and software development teams, presented on generative AI for DevOps at AWS re:Invent, and gave a talk on AI for developing countries at an event held at the United Nations in Geneva.
After AWS she served as Director of Influencer Relations at freeman + forrest. That focus on the people inside technical systems then led her to clinical mental health counseling. She is now in her Master's in Clinical Mental Health Counseling, bringing two decades of community building and an insider's understanding of high-pressure technical work to the counseling room.