Data · updated
Engineering leadership conference statistics: who is in the room
ELC Conference 2026 brought 400+ people from 134 companies to Prague, and 8 in 10 people in the room lead AI agents, people or technology. On 22 April 2027 we expect 500+.
Every number below comes from the system that counts it: the attendee list, the member registry, the Luma calendar and the newsletter tool. Each one carries its date. Cite freely, the format is at the bottom of the page. The community behind the conference publishes its own dataset at engineeringleaders.io/statistics.
- 400+
- people at the 2026 conference
- 134
- companies in the 2026 room
- 500+
- expected on 22 April 2027
- 3,612
- engineering leaders in the community that runs it
01 · Conference
How many people attend ELC Conference?
ELC Conference 2026 had 400+ attendees from 134 companies in Prague. The next edition runs on 22 April 2027 and we expect 500+. There have been 2 editions so far, 2025 and 2026.
- 20+
- speakers on stage at each edition
- 4.8 of 5
- attendee rating of the 2025 edition
- 500+
- the target for 22 April 2027
Speakers have come from SpaceX, Superhuman, Netflix, Stripe, Meta, Microsoft, Financial Times and Apify. The full lineups are on the 2026 agenda and the speakers page.
02 · Audience
Who attends ELC Conference?
8 in 10 people in the room lead AI agents, people or technology at ELC Conference 2026. Engineering leaders were 55.5% of the room, founders and executives 14.0%, senior ICs and tech leads 11.0%. 69.5% sit at manager level or above.
- Engineering leadership55.5%
- Founders and executives14.0%
- Senior ICs and tech leads11.0%
- Specialists11.3%
- Product and delivery8.2%
See the numbers as a table
| Attendee segment, 2026 | Share |
|---|---|
| Engineering leadership | 55.5% |
| Founders and executives | 14.0% |
| Senior ICs and tech leads | 11.0% |
| Specialists | 11.3% |
| Product and delivery | 8.2% |
Counted from 292 job titles on the 2026 attendee list. Crew, volunteers and venue staff are left out; speakers, partners and mentors stay in, because they're part of the room a guest meets. Titles we couldn't classify are left out of the denominator. The 2025 split was counted with a different method, so we don't compare the two years.
03 · Community
How big is the community behind the conference?
The Engineering Leaders Community, which runs ELC Conference, had 3,612 members in November 2026, counted from the member registry and republished nightly. It started in 2019and meets in Prague, Brno, Bratislava and Kraków.
- 12
- meetups a year, monthly in Prague plus three more cities
- 5
- active peer circles
- 80
- people who have spoken at an ELC event
04 · Seniority
How many CTOs, VPs and Directors are in the community?
At least 88 CTOs, 44 VPs of Engineering, 173 Directors and Heads of Engineering and 289 Engineering Managers and Team Leads. Counted from the 1,263 member profiles with a recorded title, out of 3,172 active members. 60% of profiles carry no title, so read each figure as a floor.
- CTO or CIO88
- VP of Engineering44
- Director or Head of Engineering173
- Engineering Manager or Team Lead289
- Staff, Principal or Architect112
- Founder or executive132
- Product leader18
- Other or unclassified title407
- Manager and above69%
- Senior or Staff IC21%
- Other roles10%
05 · Meetups
How many leaders sign up for an ELC meetup?
The median ELC meetup gets 125 confirmed registrations and 178 applications. Across the last 13 public meetups, counted from the Luma API, registrations ran from 86 to 237. A registration is a confirmed seat; an application counts every request, declined and waitlisted included.
06 · Reach
How many leaders read the newsletter and follow on LinkedIn?
1,500+ engineering leaders open each Leaders' Brief issue, from 2,900+ subscribers, a 54% unique-open rate. On LinkedIn, Marian Kamenistak's profile and the ELC page have 28,000+ followers. Subscribers and community members are two different groups; we count them separately and don't add them up.
- Leaders' Brief and Marian's List, unique emails3,000+
- Leaders' Brief subscribers2,900+
- Opens per issue1,500+
- Marian Kamenistak's profile26,000+
- ELC company page2,400+
- 550,000+
- LinkedIn impressions in the last 12 months
- 2,100
- impressions on the median post
07 · Mentoring
How much mentoring sits behind the community?
3,662 1:1 leadership sessions since 2019, with 317 leaders from 17+ countries. Mentees rate every session from 0 to 10 right after it. Since 2024 the average is 9.79/10. The full mentoring dataset is at marian.coach/engineering-leadership-statistics.
- 9.79/10
- average session rating since 2024
- 9.2/10
- NPS
08 · Hiring
Do companies hire engineering leaders from the community?
Yes. Partner companies hire 2.7 engineering leaders a month from the community, and 4 of 7 partners renew every year. For scale, a recruiter charges €15 to €25K per senior hire.
- Ataccama: 4 ELC meetups at its Prague HQ, 106 leaders checked in at the largest.
- Apify: 2 ELC meetups at its Prague office, the latest with 382 applications.
- Everpure: an ELC meetup at its Prague office and the first ELC meetup in Kraków.
What a company gets at the conference, with published prices, is on the partner page.
Cite
Cite this data
Free to quote with attribution, CC BY 4.0. Suggested format:
ELC Conference (2026). Engineering Leadership Conference Statistics.elc-conference.io. https://www.elc-conference.io/statistics
Need a cut that isn't on this page? Write to weare@engineeringleaders.io.
Methodology
Methodology
The 2026 audience mix classifies the job titles on the 2026 attendee list by pattern, crew removed, and counts companies after normalising legal suffixes and diacritics. Member counts come from the community registry, active members only, synced nightly. The title census only covers profiles that carry a title. The growth line starts from the nine founding members in 2019; the quarterly points from mid 2025 come from join dates in the registry. Meetup demand comes from the Luma API for public meetups, private events and the conference excluded. Newsletter reach comes from Ecomail, deduplicated across both lists; LinkedIn figures from LinkedIn analytics. Mentoring figures come from the session log and the collected reviews. Numbers round down, and each carries its own check date in the underlying registry.
Frequently asked questions
Where do these numbers come from?
Every figure comes from the system that counts it, and each one carries the date it was last checked. Conference figures come from the 2025 and 2026 attendee lists, community figures from the member registry, meetups from the public Luma calendar, reach from the newsletter tool and LinkedIn analytics, and mentoring from a session log kept since 2019.
How many people will attend ELC Conference 2027?
We expect 500+ engineering leaders in Prague on 22 April 2027. That's a target, not a count. The 2026 edition brought 400+ people from 134 companies, and 69.5% of the classified job titles were manager level or above.
Can I cite this page in an article or a report?
Yes, the data is free to use under CC BY 4.0 as long as you credit the source. Name ELC Conference, add the year and link this page, so readers can check each figure against its date. A ready-made citation sits in the Cite this data section above.
Is this the same data as the Engineering Leaders Community statistics?
Yes for the community, meetup, reach, mentoring and hiring numbers, which both pages read from the same registry. Both also show the same 2026 conference audience mix. This page adds what only the conference counts: the 134 companies in the room, the 69.5% at manager level and above, and the 2027 target.
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