Advancing the Tech Landscape: Our 2026 Women Leading Tech Finalists

Alongside an incredible cohort of industry peers, Patient Zero leaders Demelza Green (Co-CEO) and Hanieh Madad (Principal Software Engineer) have been named finalists in the 2026 Women Leading Tech Awards. 

Competing in the Executive Leader and Engineer categories, their nominations recognise their impact on Australia’s sovereign AI landscape and mission-critical engineering governance. Further solidifying this impact, both were also featured on the official Women Leading Tech Power List, the definitive "who's who" of the Australian and New Zealand tech scene. 



The 2026 Event at a Glance 

• Event: Women Leading Tech Awards 2026, presented by Atlassian 
• Official Announcement: View the Full 2026 Finalists List 
• Gala Date: Friday, 20 March 2026 
• Location: ICC Sydney 
• Organiser: The Misfits Media Company (B&T)
  

About the Women Leading Tech Awards

The Women Leading Tech Awards, presented by Atlassian, is Australia’s premier program for recognising women that drive innovation and change across the technology sector. In 2026, the awards are structured across three core pillars; Job Role, Industry, and Changemaker, to highlight the breadth of talent across the Asia-Pacific region. 

• The Vision: Designed to foster a more inclusive industry by celebrating technical excellence and executive leadership. 
• The 2026 Categories: Nominations span critical fields including Engineering, AI Pioneer, Cyber Security, and Executive Leader. 
• The Judging Process: Finalists are selected by an independent panel of industry veterans based on technical impact and contribution to the tech community. 
  

Demelza Green: Executive Leader and Technical Stewardship

Finalist: Executive Leader 

Demelza’s nomination for Executive Leader recognises her role in driving technical stewardship at the highest level of Patient Zero. Alongside the other Co-CEOs, she has architected a business model to make Patient Zero an employer of choice by attracting and retaining top-tier talent and fostering an environment where diverse perspectives are elevated into meaningful thought leadership. 

Her own contributions to the industry reflect a commitment to solving complex customer problems through a highly balanced and creative approach to product, technical, and go-to-market strategy. 

Demelza's Leadership in Action 

• Culture of Excellence: Leads the mission to attract amazing talent, focusing on high-performance engineering culture and lifting team members' voices into the industry spotlight. 

• Creative Problem Solving: Applies a holistic view of the technology lifecycle to deliver creative solutions for enterprise and government partners that balance market needs with rigorous product management. 

• Operational Innovation: Co-founded 10,000 Spoons, a consultancy that leverages Agentic AI to provide SMEs with the same high-level technical stewardship and C-Suite governance found in major enterprises.

• Workforce Representation: Under her co-leadership, Patient Zero has achieved a team composition that is 48.5% female, significantly outpacing the industry average of 29%. 
  

Hanieh Madad: Engineering Rigour and Complex Systems

Finalist: Engineer 

Nominated in the Engineer category, Principal Software Engineer Hanieh Madad represents the pinnacle of technical stewardship and inclusive leadership. Her work is defined by a commitment to solving high-stakes architectural challenges by prioritising psychological safety and the elevation of her peers. By fostering an environment where mentorship is the baseline, she ensures that the teams building critical services are as resilient and high performing as the software they deliver.



Hanieh’s Engineering at Scale 

• Technical Advocacy: A recognised voice in the Australian engineering community, recently featured at DDD Brisbane, presenting on the practical implementation of Spec-Driven Development. 

• Architecture for Scale & Efficiency: Serves as the technical lead for massive education-based infrastructure, designing sophisticated workflows that recoup significant productivity, while maintaining industry-leading uptime. 

• Technical Mentorship: Launched "Certember," a company-wide initiative that empowered 13% of the Patient Zero workforce to achieve new technical certifications in a single month. 
  

Why This Matters for Our Partners

When you partner with Patient Zero, you aren't just hiring developers. You are engaging with a delivery model shaped by the industry's recognised leaders. These nominations validate that our focus on Sovereign Engineering, AI Workflows, and Human-AI Collaboration is setting the standard for the Australian tech landscape in 2026. 

We look forward to celebrating alongside the other pioneers and innovators shaping our industry at the ICC Sydney this March. 

Explore Our Technical Stewardship

To learn more about how our leaders and teams solve complex challenges, explore our core focus areas: 

• AI & Emerging Tech: Discover how we move beyond the hype to deliver practical, secure AI solutions and Agentic workflows. 
• Embedded Software Teams: Learn how our culture of mentorship and psychological safety builds high-performance delivery teams. 
• App Modernisation & Cloud: See our approach to architecting for scale and ensuring long-term resilience for mission-critical systems. 

About the Finalists 

Demelza Green is the Co-CEO of Patient Zero and 10,000 Spoons. A Women in Digital UX Leader of the Year and ARN Innovation Award winner, she sits at the intersection of human experience and technical reality. She believes that while tools change, the fundamentals of good design and engineering rigour never go away. 

Her goal? To help Australian businesses stop admiring the problem and start building the solution.

Hanieh Madad is a Principal Software Engineer at Patient Zero who believes that engineering culture is built, not bought.

An award-winning technologist with a relentless drive for upskilling, she is the force behind internal initiatives like "Certember" and a passionate advocate for continuous learning. Currently, she is deep-diving into Agentic AI, exploring how emerging tech can augment developer workflows without replacing the human creativity that drives them.