Sunny Myers

The Engineer Who Asked for the Front Lines

Her entry into recruiting began with an observation she could not unsee. As a young engineer, she was one of the only women of color in the space and the only Indigenous woman. "I looked around and was like, this isn't OK," she says. "And I want to leave it better than I found it."

So she made a case. At a previous company, she convinced the team to put her on the front lines, joining the early career recruiting team at campus events and in conversations with students who had never met an engineer who shared their background. The logic was simple: if they could see her, they could see themselves in the space. The numbers started to shift. The early talent pipeline broadened into marginalized and underrepresented communities, and the work later extended into other career areas, a harder and slower fight that also, she notes, raised the bar the organization set for itself.

She is candid that she fell into recruiting rather than choosing it. What she found there was a lever big enough to change who gets to build technology.

The People Who Built Her Confidence

Ask Myers who shaped her and she names three people without hesitation. The first is Ken Donahue, a sponsor who arrived at a pivotal moment in her early to mid career. An executive and a white man, he held her accountable to what she was actually capable of, elevated her into rooms and spaces she had no access to, and, in her words, believed in her a whole lot of extra. When she felt stuck, frustrated or convinced she could not do something, she went to him and left with a new way to think about it. "He really gave me my superpower," she says. They remain close. She texted him an old photo just the other day.

The second is Hilda Pennix Raglan, a mentor and woman of color who has served on corporate, nonprofit and institutional boards. Myers describes her as the person she wants to be when she grows up. Pennix Raglan had walked the same path and knew exactly what Myers would encounter, which made her counsel unusually precise. She is also, Myers says with affection, a little spicy, the rare combination of real warmth and real boldness.

The third is present tense. Myers credits her manager, Casey Christensen, for the fact that she is thriving right now. She points to the way he advocates for the team, the way he is always looking around the corner, and a transparency and vulnerability she genuinely values. He operates with a high safety ratio while holding his team firmly accountable. There is no squeezing through or squeezing by, she says, but you leave feeling inspired rather than squeezed. Having someone reliably at her back, she adds, gives her the breathing room to bring her best self to the table and has made her a better leader in turn.

A Complicated Relationship With the Hype

On artificial intelligence, Myers is neither evangelist nor skeptic for sport. She is something rarer: someone in a technical space who insists on holding two truths at once. She scrolled LinkedIn recently and found every post in her feed was about AI, and wondered aloud whether the industry could return to a world where people did not have to write about AI simply to feel they were adding value.

Her hesitation is personal and principled. As an Indigenous woman and land steward, she is acutely aware of the direct impact these technologies have had on her communities, while also recognizing that working in a technical environment carries a standard of adapting to new tools. She calls it a challenging and complex place to stand.

She also asks the question most enterprises are skipping. "Everything else in business, we have to have an ROI justification before we move forward," she says. "And I feel like we've really blindly adopted these AI tools without looking at the ROI." Her concern is not that the tools lack value. It is that value is being assumed rather than measured, because saying you use AI has become the expectation. She expects a reckoning, a moment when organizations evaluate these investments seriously for the first time, and she believes the responsible and ethical lens deserves the same rigor.

What she will credit is access. Upskilling and up leveling have become genuinely more available to more people: interview preparation, resume building, reaching contacts inside an organization. "It's no longer a good old boys network," she says. Candidates can now access information and prepare from the back end in ways that were once reserved for the well connected.

Keep the Human in the Loop

Her advice to talent leaders is direct. There still needs to be a human in the loop. Myers acknowledges the fear running through the profession about which jobs survive this era, and she does not claim to have mastered managing that fear herself. But she is clear about where the answer lies.

The opportunity, as she frames it, is to hand the dredge work to the tools so people can spend more time in what she calls their zone of brilliance. Recruiters love the face to face. They love meeting candidates and hiring managers. It is the back end churn that weighs the process down and drives burnout. Aim the technology there, she argues, and the humans get to shine where they are irreplaceable.

She is protective of her own team, too. Fastly's recruiters, she says, are "just a bunch of baddies" who still care about the human side of things. They use the tools, and they still guard the connection and the experience, because at the end of the day people work with each other and not just with software.

Who Is Not in the Room

Myers saves her sharpest challenge for the current moment in diversity, equity and inclusion. Watching organizations pull back from hiring underrepresented talent under political and regulatory pressure, she believes the industry is heading into a real deficit that will be obvious in hindsight.

Her ask of leaders is a set of questions rather than a program. Look at your talent. Who is not in the room? Who is leaving and exiting the organization, and do you understand why? Some of the most brilliant minds in technology, including in AI, come from marginalized communities, and she is emphatic that this is not tokenism. They earned their place.

The stakes, in her view, compound when nobody is checking the work. "When we let these tools who were built by dominant populations just kind of take over without checking the data, I think we're really going to miss out as a society of literally greatness." Her prescription is a pause, an audit of what is happening on the back end, and a renewed clarity about why any of it matters. Even amid competing pressures, she says, this work is still important.