Girl Geek X –

POPSUGAR invites you to a Girl Geek X Dinner on Thursday, March 22 in San Francisco!

Come hear from several of our talented female engineering, product and business leads about how we leverage technology in all aspects of our business and how we use innovation to fuel growth and future proof our business.

Agenda:

6:00pm – 7:00pm: Check-in, Dinner & Networking!
7:00pm – 8:00pm: Welcome & POPSUGAR Girl Geeks Give Talks!
8:00pm – 9:00pm: Drinks & Networking!

POPSUGAR Girl Geek Speaker Bios:

Krista Moatz, Founder & Executive VP of Culture & Corporate Citizenship
Krista is executive vice president of culture and corporate citizenship for POPSUGAR. She is responsible for perpetuating the company’s values throughout the organization, ensuring clear and consistent internal communication, and designing and implementing the company’s corporate citizen efforts. Krista helped found POPSUGAR in 2006 alongside Lisa and Brian Sugar. Prior to her current role, Krista was executive vice president of editorial operations and worked alongside founder Lisa Sugar to build POPSUGAR’s editorial team. Krista earned a bachelor’s degree in business administration with a concentration in accounting from the University of Washington. She lives in San Francisco with her husband and two sons and serves on the board of directors of Compass Family Services and the board of trustees of Town School for Boys. She loves Barry’s Bootcamp, pizza, and Tahoe. Follow her on Twitter at @KristaMoatz.

Talk Topic: “POPSUGAR X Technology” by Krista Moatz
Talk Description: “Krista will walk through the evolution of POPSUGAR from its beginnings as personal blog in 2005 to the modern media company it is today and how technology has been with us every step of the way.”

Tara Kalmanson, Product Manager
Tara is the product manager for growth at POPSUGAR, leading all off-site user experiences ranging from mobile apps to in-house email products to distributed platforms. She came to POPSUGAR with a background in gaming/messaging and holds a journalism degree from Northwestern University. Follow her on Twitter at @TaraKalmanson.

Olena Beyer, Senior Software Engineer
Olena is a senior fullstack engineer at POPSUGAR working on Google Amp, Facebook Instant, and other distributed platforms. Her first job in the US was at the Ukrainian Consulate in San Francisco. After falling in love with the city, she decided to never leave and realize her talent in Silicon Valley. She spends her free time exploring the world with her two children.

Talk Topic: “Opportunities and Limitations of Google Amp” by Tara Kalmanson & Olena Beyer
Talk Description: “As a modern media company, we recognize that our readers don’t always come to our site — we have to come to them. POPSUGAR was one of the earliest adopters of Google AMP, an open-source library which makes mobile webpages load nearly instantly. We’ll dive into how we solved some of the latest problems, like refreshing content dynamically on cached pages without using Ajax.”

Viktoriia Ponyatina, Senior Software Engineer
Viktoriia joined POPSUGAR over 5 years ago as a remote developer based in Russia. She moved to the San Francisco headquarters in 2014 and is currently a senior software engineer leading the Voices and Shop development teams. Viktoriia graduated with honors from Bryansk State Technical University where she studied Dynamics and Strength of Machines. Since graduation, she has continuously improved her ability to work anywhere in the technical stack. Viktoriia is very passionate about good clean code, is eager to learn new technologies, and enjoys encouraging other engineers to grow with her.

Shilpa Shetty, Software Engineer
Shilpa is a software engineer on the Influencer/Voices development team at POPSUGAR. She is responsible for building end-to-end solutions that allow external contributors to write and manage content for POPSUGAR. Shilpa spearheaded POPSUGAR’s SMS chat initiative and is a contributor to POPSUGAR’s Facebook Messenger bot. Shilpa earned her Master’s degree in Computer Science from Santa Clara University. In her free time, she loves to read and travel.

Talk Topic: “How Technology Amplifies the POPSUGAR Voice” by Viktoriia Ponyatina & Shilpa Shetty
Talk Description: “Come discover POPSUGAR Voices, a one-of-a-kind platform that allows anyone with a passion for writing to submit content to POPSUGAR. Learn how we built this platform and addressed issues such as security, performance, and payment integration.”

Lauren Hendrickson, Director of Shop Product Management
Lauren is director of shop product management at POPSUGAR. She harnesses her love of data and shopping to strategize content across all verticals, ensuring readers know about the latest trends and best products. She started at POPSUGAR as a community manager and has since worn many hats in several departments. She graduated from UC Santa Barbara with a degree in Economics and Art History. She loves Bar Method, growing heirloom tomatoes, and remodeling her house. Follow her on POPSUGAR here.

Shilpa Kaji, Director of Must Have Operations
Shilpa was the first dedicated person to be hired for the POPSUGAR Must Have subscription box team and is now the director of operations and planning for the program, closely partnering with cross-functional teams across the company. Prior to POPSUGAR, Shilpa worked at Gilt Groupe and Gap, Inc. She graduated from New York University in 2008, with degrees in Urban Design and Economics. In May, she will be pursuing her Executive MBA at The Wharton School at University of Pennsylvania. Shilpa has been fortunate to have many formative mentors in her career and feels that it’s her responsibility to pay forward the knowledge and lessons she’s learned to the next generation of leaders.

Talk Topic: “Beyond Media: Where Commerce & Content Intersect” by Lauren Hendrickson & Shilpa Kaji
Talk Description: “POPSUGAR Shop and POPSUGAR Must Have differentiate us in the media publishing space and drive additional revenue for the entire company. We’ll touch upon how we leverage our existing technology to iterate quickly and share what we think are the best ways business and engineering can work together.”

Sabrina Eldredge, VP of Product
Sabrina is vice president of product at POPSUGAR. She combines her design and development skills to create best-in-class tools for the editorial staff, engaging interactions for readers, and cutting-edge experiences for brand partners. Sabrina joined POPSUGAR in 2006 and has held a variety of roles, including blog platform evangelist, game producer, and food editor. Prior to POPSUGAR, Sabrina led UX design for TowerRecords.com, developed software for technology companies, and was blogging from her Palm Pilot before “blogging” was a verb. She received a BA in computer science and fine art from UC Santa Cruz and is a proud Banana Slug. When she’s not dreaming up new product ideas, you can find her baking chocolate chip cookies while binge-listening to podcasts. Follow her on Twitter at @sabrinabot.

Talk Topic: “Staying Ahead of the Game” by Sabrina Eldredge
Talk Description: “As the media industry continues to evolve, innovation is needed to stay ahead of the game. Learn how POPSUGAR uses new technologies such as augmented reality, facial recognition, and SMS purchasing to create delightful experiences for our readers. And then discover how we carve out time for the future and how you can do the same.”

Please Follow Us:

Twitter: @GirlGeekX @POPSUGAR
Event Hashtag: #GirlGeekXPOPSUGAR

About POPSUGAR:

With a global reach of over 400M people, POPSUGAR is a modern media company delivering inspiring, informative, and entertaining multi-platform content across entertainment, fashion, beauty, fitness, food, parenting, news and more.

Event Tickets & Details:

Tickets go onsale on Thursday, March 8th, 2018 at NOON (PST) on Eventbrite.

Join us for a Girl Geek X SurveyMonkey Dinner in San Mateo on Thursday, March 15th, 2018!

Hear tech talks from various women in engineering and product, followed by a career panel of executives moderated by SurveyMonkey CTO Robin Ducot! She will share the story of her career path and her decision to join SurveyMonkey. The group will provide insights on career path-related topics such as how to make deliberate career decisions, when to change jobs or careers, how to ask for promotion.

Agenda:

6:00pm – 7:00pm: Registration, food, drinks & networking!
7:00pm – 8:00pm: Welcome, tech talks & career panel
8:00pm – 8:30pm: More networking!

SurveyMonkey Girl Geek Speaker Bios:

Louise Fox, Engineering Manager
Louise is an Engineering Manager at SurveyMonkey where she works with a team of engineers on all things related to frontend architecture. During her tenure at SurveyMonkey, she also held positions as a full stack engineer and software web app developer. Starting her career as a Mechanical Engineer at Lam Research, Louise designed and tested parts for large-scale production on various projects focusing on vibration and heat transfer. After Lam, she worked at Otherlab, where she focused on low cost novel actuators for heliostat application using 3d printers, laser cutters, Autodesk CAD, SolidWorks CAD, and FEA software. Louise graduated first in class from California State University, Chico where she earned her B.S. in Mechanical Engineering. Louise also works on a number of open source projects: Bitcoin Private, Zclassic, and SurveyMonkey related open source projects. Follow her on Twitter at @kaboomfox.

Talk Topic: “Evolving Front-End Architecture at SurveyMonkey” by Louise Fox & Mala Neti
Talk Description: “Learn about SurveyMonkey’s efforts to move to a monolithic front-end architecture with a graphQL aggregation layer in an effort to streamline engineering velocity and front-end performance.”

Mala Neti, Software Engineer
Mala is a software engineer on the UI Platform team at SurveyMonkey, with a passion for front-end development. Prior to this, she was a web app developer on the Mobile Team, primarily working on the mobile web platform. Mala graduated with an engineering degree from UC Berkeley in 2013. She has a passion for public speaking, and encouraging more women to pursue technical speaking in their fields.

Shayani Roy, Director of Product Management
Shayani is a director of product management at SurveyMonkey. She leads the Analyze and Collaboration product lines that help customers work efficiently and get valuable insights from their survey results. Shayani has led multiple product teams since she joined SurveyMonkey in 2013. She is an ex-aeronautics engineer, is passionate about building new products at scale and has recently discovered the joys of urban gardening. Shayani earned an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business and a Masters in Aeronautics & Astronautics Engineering from Purdue University. Follow her on Twitter at @shayani2910.

Talk Topic: “Building a Compelling Vision Together” by Shayani Roy & Hally Bowman
Talk Description: “Getting buy-in to execute after delivering a compelling vision to your executive team is the first step in all great product launches. At SurveyMonkey, product, design, and engineering leaders work together to shape that compelling vision. We’ll touch on the process we used and various milestones that shaped the future vision of helping our customers get insights from their data.”

Hally Bowman, Senior Product Designer
Hally joined SurveyMonkey over two years ago and leads product design for Analyze, SurveyMonkey’s analytics tool that helps users reveal valuable insights from their survey results. Prior to SurveyMonkey, she lived in London and worked as UX designer at MOO where she drove design for the enterprise application known as MOO for Business. Prior to working in the digital design world, Hally worked as an electrical design engineer. Follow her on Twitter at @hallybowman.

Jessica Egoyibo Mong, Senior Software Engineer
Jessica is a senior software engineer on the Machine Learning Engineering team at SurveyMonkey. She also oversees the technical talks program, jointly manages the engineering internship program, and co-leads the Women in Engineering group. Jessica is a 2014 White House Initiative on HBCUs All-Star, a Hackbright alum (Summer 2013) and CODE2040 alum (Summer 2014). She has served on the leadership team of the Silicon Valley local chapter of the Anita Borg Institute and is a member of /dev/color. Jessica earned her B.S. in Computer Engineering from Claflin University in South Carolina.

Talk Topic: “Quick Peek into SurveyMonkey’s Machine Learning Ecosystem” by Jessica Egoyibo Mong
Talk Description: “In 2017, SurveyMonkey received over 12 billion individual responses from over 17 million surveys. Learn how SurveyMonkey is harnessing this data to deliver an intuitive and safe platform for users.”

Robin Ducot, Chief Technology Officer
Robin joined SurveyMonkey in October 2017. She leads the company’s engineering function and works closely with product, design, and data teams to help define our technical product vision. Previously, Robin spent five years as Senior Vice President of Product Engineering at DocuSign where she scaled the engineering team into a high-velocity streamlined organization using scaled agile framework, moved the product to a multi-product platform with a service-oriented architecture, and shifted the organization to a continuous integration delivery model. Prior to that, she was the Vice President of Engineering at Eventbrite responsible for delivery of their platform and building out a complete engineering organization with extremely high staffing standards. Robin earned her BS in Computer Science from University of Massachusetts, Boston. Follow her on Twitter at @rducot.

Robin Ducot is moderating a career panel at Girl Geek X SurveyMonkey Dinner.

Erica Weiss Tjader, VP of Product Design
Erica is the VP of product design at SurveyMonkey. She joined the company in 2017 with the mission to make design a competitive advantage for SurveyMonkey. Previously, Erica spent six years at Quantcast as the Director of Product Design, where she was responsible for building the design and research functions. Prior to that, she was an Interaction Designer and User Researcher at Move, eBay and Yahoo. Erica earned a B.S. in Cognitive Science and B.A. in Communication Studies from UCLA. She is passionate about great product design, career development, and California sun. Follow her on Twitter at @ericatjader.

Erica Weiss Tjader is on a career panel at Girl Geek X SurveyMonkey Dinner.

Deepti Patibandla, Senior Director of Product Management
Deepti is the senior director of product management at SurveyMonkey. She leads the enterprise side of product initiatives in close partnership with sales, marketing, and customer success to deliver an end-to-end solution for organizations at scale. Deepti has a broad spectrum of experience in product management, and prior to SurveyMonkey she led various teams and initiatives at companies ranging from startups to public companies. Deepti earned her Bachelor’s in Electronics & Communications from India, an MBA from Haas School of Business, Berkeley.

Prachi Sakharkar is on a career panel at Girl Geek X SurveyMonkey Dinner.

Phuong Trang, Director of Program Management
Phuong leads the technical program management team and is responsible for planning and delivery of SurveyMonkey product roadmap. She has over 15 years of experience working in high tech, leading teams to deliver complex cross-functional programs. Previously, Phuong was at Shutterfly where she was responsible for the execution of TinyPrints and Wedding Paper Divas strategy. Before Shutterfly, Phuong spent six years at Intuit on the small business division and web center of excellence teams and held roles in both program management and engineering. She has a passion for operational excellence, building high functioning teams while creating a collaborative culture.

Phuong Trang is on a career panel at Girl Geek X SurveyMonkey Dinner.

Prachi Sakharkar, Senior Engineering Manager
Prachi is a senior engineering manager at SurveyMonkey. She manages the survey creation and the survey taking experience teams, which account for more than 9 million responses in a day. Prachi earned a Master’s in Computer Science from USC. Prachi contributes her growth to being curious and asking questions while being an active listener, which are both essential to effective Communication. Follow her on Twitter at @olipeno.

Prachi Sakharkar is on a career panel at Girl Geek X SurveyMonkey Dinner.

Please Follow Us:

Twitter: @GirlGeekX @SurveyMonkey
Event Hashtag: #GirlGeekXSurveyMonkey

About SurveyMonkey:

SurveyMonkey’s 650+ employees throughout North America, Europe and Asia Pacific are dedicated to powering the curious.

Event Tickets & Details:

Tickets go onsale on Tuesday, February 27th, 2018 on Eventbrite.

Join the “Leverettes” for our first Girl Geek X Lever Dinner on March 7th in downtown San Francisco! We’ll talk about how design thinking frames everything we do, why Lever builds on operational transform, using Elasticsearch, the challenges with APIs, our worst interview experiences, and the times we’ve broken production (it happens to the best of us).

Speakers include Lever CEO & Co-Founder, Sarah Nahm, Engineering Manager Rachael Stedman, Backend Engineer Mica Swyers, and Full-Stack Product Engineers, Emily Shenfield, Kate Reading, Leslie Kim, Melissa Skevington, and Jen Wei.

Agenda:

6:00pm – 6:45pm: Doors Open & Bites Served
6:45pm – 7:45pm: Welcome & Lightning Talks
7:45pm – 8:00pm: Leverettes Panel
8:00pm – 9:00pm: Hangout

Lever Girl Geek Speaker Bios:

Sarah Nahm, Founder & CEO
Sarah is the CEO and founder of Lever. She steers Lever’s design-driven approach and leads our mission to put talent and teams at the center of organizations. Prior to Lever, Sarah worked at Google on initiatives as diverse as leading the growth of the Chrome browser from launch to over 150M active users, to speech writing for Marissa Mayer. A self-taught programmer, Sarah received her BS in engineering and product design from Stanford University, where she occasionally returns to coach design students at Stanford’s d.school. Follow her on Twitter at @srhnhm.

Rachael Stedman, Engineering Manager
Rachael is Lever’s Engineering Manager for Backend and Infrastructure. She spends a lot of time thinking about how Lever’s growing engineering team can work better together and be more inclusive. Prior to joining the team, she developed an expense tracking app in Intuit’s innovation lab and determined the product management strategy for Google TV media devices playback. She spent some time in Australia getting to know the startup community down under. Follow her on Twitter at @rkstedman.

Talk Topic: “Creating a Better User Experience with Operational Transform”
Talk Description: “Handling concurrency is a common problem in web apps. In this talk, Rachael will share how Lever uses operational transform to handle conflicts and how it fundamentally improves the user experience.”

Melissa Skevington, Product Engineer
Melissa is a product engineer at Lever. In February 2012, Melissa became the first female support engineer at Dropbox. After learning the product inside and out, she decided to continue learning to code in order to have a bigger impact on a product. Since then, Melissa has gained a breadth of product engineering experience from web development for a small YC startup to building backend services for Hipmunk. Follow her on Twitter at @mskeving.

Talk Topic: “A Guide to Hackathons”
Talk Description: “Hackathon – noun, an event, typically lasting several days, in which a large number of people meet to engage in collaborative computer programming. Or, to those more familiar with Silicon Valley culture, a way to aggressively burn out on a project that wasn’t even part of your roadmap. Missy will talk about how Lever approaches hackathons, and how your team can reap the benefits of a hackathon without the burnout.”

Leslie Kim, Product Engineer
Leslie is a product engineer at Lever. She has worked in several different industries including film, standup comedy, teaching and real estate before going back to school to become a software engineer. Lever was Leslie’s first engineering job after finishing school. Starting out as an intern, Leslie joined full time after 3 months.

Kate Reading, Product Engineer
Kate is a product engineer at Lever. After 13 years building security software for the federal government, she came to Lever to be part of a team and learn a new stack. She loves bringing order to chaos – in code, in whiteboarding system design, and in team retrospectives. Follow her on Twitter at @katerita.

Talk Topic: “Nurture Recommendations & Elasticsearch”
Talk Description: “We know your archive of candidates is full of ‘the one that got away’, but how do you teach a computer to find them? Kate will talk about using Elasticsearch to build up Lever’s intuition for matching human potential with meaningful work. (mission statement?”

Jen Wei, Product Engineer
Jen is a product engineer at Lever. She was Lever’s first intern and set the bar for all future interns! She just graduated from Olin with a degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering. Previously, Jen also interned on the maps team at Tableau, 3D Robotics, and Boosted Boards. She was also a Student VC at Rough Draft Ventures.

Talk Topic: “From New Grad to New Hire”
Talk Description: “Making the transition from new grad to new hire can be tough. Having recently gone through that exact transition after graduating in 2017 (and still going through it), Jen will share her experiences onboarding, tackling technical debt and stories about joining Lever full-time. There may or may not be a lot of gifs.”

Mica Swyers, Backend Systems Engineer
Mica joins the Lever engineering team as a backend systems engineer after almost four years fighting spam and fraud at Eventbrite. Before learning to code, she racked up graduate degrees in unrelated subjects. In her free time, she is an aggressive taker-on of hobbies and makes questionable media choices. Follow her on Twitter at @micaswyers.

Talk Topic: “Squashing vs. Non-Squashing — Technical Angle & Imposter Syndrome”
Talk Description: “Do you feel like you know just enough git to get (hehe) by? Do you break out into a cold sweat at the thought of deviating from your entrenched git workflow? Mica does too! As the newest member of Lever’s engineering team, she will discuss adjusting to a different git workflow, using squashed commits as a security blanket, and how this all relates to imposter syndrome.”

Emily Shenfield, Product Engineer
Emily is a product engineer at Lever. She is an actress turned teacher turned engineer who enjoys thinking about the way things work together – be it code or people. Probably in part due to her time working with 7 year olds, Emily brings a special talent for staying positive. Recently, she’s worked extensively on expanding Lever’s integrations and would love to talk to you about APIs. Follow her on Twitter at @ememshen.

Talk Topic: “API Challenges”
Talk Description: “People count on their collaborative work software to be as connected as their personal software. Building, maintaining, and supporting integrations is a daily part of our job, so why do we keep running into the same problems? Emily discusses some of the challenges we’ve faced over and over again at Lever from humans being on vacation, to stack overflow ghost towns — and what we’re doing to tackle them.”

Please Follow Us:

Twitter: @GirlGeekX @Lever
Event Hashtag: #GirlGeekXLever

About Lever:

We founded Lever in 2012 to tackle the most strategic challenge that companies face: how to grow their teams. We’re injecting the values we respect – collaboration, transparency, and humanity – into our software and re-imagining how organizations can think about growth, with talent and teamwork at the center.

Our team strives to set a new bar for enterprise software with modern, well-designed, real-time apps. As the applicant tracking system of choice for Netflix, Lyft, Eventbrite, Cirque Du SoleiI, ClearSlide, change.org, and thousands more leading companies, Lever means you hire the best by hiring together.

We are committed to building a team culture that celebrates diversity and inclusion and builds with empathy

Event Tickets & Details:

Tickets go onsale on Tuesday, February 13th, 2018 on Eventbrite.

You are invited to Girl Geek X Optimizely Dinner on Thursday, March 1st, 2018 at Optimizely’s office in San Francisco!

We will participate in icebreaker activities — meet fellow women in tech over dinner and drinks! Then we will ask the panel of Optimizely women questions on problem solving, feedback, mentorship, and productivity — from marketing, success, engineering, and sales!

Agenda:

5:30pm – 6:15pm: Registration, Food & Drinks
6:15pm – 7:15pm: Panel Discussion
7:15pm – 8:00pm: Networking & More Food!

Optimizely Girl Geek Speaker Bios:

Jennifer Ruth, VP Customer Success
Jennifer is VP of Customer Success at Optimizely. Her team is committed to making their customers’ experimentation programs wildly successful by driving product adoption, delivering thought leadership and advocating on behalf of customers inside Optimizely. Prior to Optimizely, Jennifer led the Adobe Customer Success Team in Asia-Pacific. She has worked in investment banking, marketing, finance and SAAS, and served as an United States Peace Corps volunteer. She earned her bachelor’s degree from Washington University, St. Louis.

Elizabeth Eady, Engineering Manager, DevOps
Elizabeth has applied her bias towards clear concise communication and shared understanding of fundamentals from her time studying Mathematics at UC Berkeley to learning about systems theory and Devops since 2013. Her core motivation is enabling her coworkers to do the best job they can as themselves. She is doing just that as the contributing manager for the Engineers for Engineers team at Optimizely, responsible for improving the productivity and quality of the entire engineering team. Before Optimizely, she led the Nuna Inc’s Infrastructure Engineering team Inc on a variety of projects, from data warehouse migrations to data distribution efforts on behalf of the US government. Outside of work, Elizabeth is an armchair mathematician, freelance artist, and occasional cat impersonator.

Neha Singla, Engineering Manager, Application Backend
Neha heads up the Application Backend team at Optimizely where she’s been for 5 years. Her kickass team powers all the account data that customers see on Optimizely. After receiving her masters degree from Italy, Neha worked at Microsoft for 5 years before coming to Optimizely. Neha believes in leading by example. She’s excited about bringing Girl Geek to Optimizely for the 3rd time. In her free time, she loves traveling, painting and plotting monthly pictures of her baby.

Kelly Walker, Senior Software Engineer
Kelly is a software engineer at Optimizely. She started at Optimizely as a Product Designer, then transitioned into UI engineering, then (mostly frontend) software engineering. Before Optimizely, she worked at a few other tech startups in SF, and studied graphic design at UC Davis. A California native, she now works remotely from New Haven, Connecticut, and is trying to learn to love real seasons. Follow her on Twitter at @bcdonner.

Heather Hargreaves, Solutions Engineer
Heather is a Solutions Engineer at Optimizely. She works exclusively with the sales team to ensure potential customers are confident leveraging Optimizely across their tech stack. Prior to Optimizely, she worked in sales at MuleSoft and received a scholarship from Lesbians Who Tech to attend a coding boot camp in Utah. She earned her bachelor’s degree from UC Berkeley where she was recruited to be a Division I athlete. While she does not row after medaling at NCAAs and winning conference championships she stays competitive by hustling pool tables around the city and getting on the leaderboard at spin class.

Greeshma Yellareddy, Performance Engineer
Greeshma is a Performance Engineer at Optimizely. She focuses on Javascript performance at Optimizely. Before Optimizely, she worked as a compiler engineer and hardware engineer, always focussing on performance/efficiency. In her free time, she likes to travel, backpack and write.

Jessica Chong, Software Engineer
Jessica is a frontend engineer. She joined Optimizely via the I/Own It scholarship, which she helped run again this past year. Prior to working as a software engineer, Jessica worked at a nonprofit, a publishing company, a digital agency, and spent several years writing, designing, and building websites for clients ranging from an MMA judging app to a fish restaurant. (She has worn many hats indeed!) She enjoys knitting, reading, drawing, and exploring. She studied Geography at Vassar. Follow her on Twitter at @crocophant.

Please Follow Us:

Twitter: @GirlGeekX @Optimizely
Event Hashtag: #GirlGeekXOptimizely

About Optimizely:

Be brave, experiment everywhere, and transform your customer experience with Optimizely.

Event Tickets & Details:

Tickets go onsale on Tuesday, February 13th, 2018 on Eventbrite.

You’re invited to a Girl Geek X Amazon Lab126 Dinner at our office in Sunnyvale on February 27th, 2018. Join us for an exciting evening featuring lightening talks and a panel discussion by our women in tech, delicious food and drink, cool swag, demos, and a raffle!

Our speakers and panelists include women from an Amazon Devices New Initiative team as well as from various Alexa teams. We’ll talk about the devices which have come from Lab126 including the Fire Tablet, Fire TV, Kindle e-readers, and Alexa devices. We will also discuss how we bring devices to the market from concept to launch, Amazon’s product management process, and the challenges and fun aspects of working in a fast pace environment to continually add new features and improve software quality.

Agenda:

6:00pm – 7:00pm: Registration & Food & Drinks & Networking
7:00pm – 8:00pm: Welcome & Talks
8:00pm – 8:30pm: Panel Discussion & Q&A
8:30pm – 9:00pm: Raffle & Networking

Amazon Girl Geek Speaker Bios & Talks:

Heidi Schubert, Senior Software Development Manager – Amazon Devices New Initiative
Heidi is a Senior Software Development Manager on an Amazon Devices New Initiative team. Heidi joined Lab126 five years ago to manage the developer tools team for tablets and the Fire Phone. Since then she has led several different areas within Fire OS including DevOps and QA. Prior to joining Amazon, Heidi was a Director of Research at Real-Time Innovations (RTI). RTI develops real-time publish-subscribe middleware. Heidi held multiple different positions at RTI over ten years including consulting on autonomous systems, software development, and research into safety-critical software. Heidi holds a Ph.D. from Stanford in Aerospace Engineering, and her Ph.D. thesis was on the control of flexible space-based robotic manipulators. Follow her on Twitter at @srhnhm.

Heidi Schubert’s Talk Description: Amazon Lab 126 released the first Fire Tablet in 2011 and the first Fire TV in 2014. Since then, one or models have been released each year. The software team builds new features for each new product, and makes the new software available on existing products. This talk will review some of the software innovations that were done on these products, and the different software teams that contribute to the products including Fire OS. Heidi will talk about how the software teams can add new features, support a fast pace, and continually improve software quality.

Latha Ramanan, Principal Product Manager – Alexa
Latha is a Principal Product Manager (Technical) with the Alexa Experiences and Devices team. Latha joined Lab126 3.5 years ago to develop Fire Phones. She moved to Alexa group and worked on bringing intuitive core user experiences to Alexa display devices such as Echo Show and Echo Spot. She was the lead product manager for the recently launched Echo Spot managing both hardware and software product decisions. She is now focused on bringing up new services for Alexa display devices. Prior to joining Amazon, Latha was a Senior Product Marketing Manager at Intel working with third party customers and ecosystem partners to bring Intel mobile phones and tablets to market. She spent most of her 14 years working on Mobile/Wireless ecosystem, software strategy and ecosystem enabling in the Mobile wireless space in various positions like software engineer, technical enabling, solutions manager, Strategy Planner and Product manager. She started her career as a software engineer working on Linux client and Windows server to bring Internet Set-top box to clients in Spain back in 2001. She has a Master’s in Computer Science and an MBA.

Savitha Gouda, Senior Technical Program Manager – Alexa
Savitha is a Senior Technical Program Manager in the Alexa AVS Certification team. Savitha joined AVS a year ago to manage the Certification Program for 3P products comes with AVS integration. Since then she is involved in building team and have certified hundreds of products and most of them are launched in Market too. Prior to joining Amazon, Savitha was a Principal TPM at LG electronics managing WebOS releases for various LG business units like Signage, TV, H&A, Mobile. Savitha held multiple different positions in consulting companies like TCS, Accenture and product development roles at SAP over ten years including developer, SDM, Architect, Director in ERP/CRM/on-demand product development; She has mixed background of consulting and product development. Savitha holds a Master’s degree in computer application, and various project management certifications like PMP, PMI-ACP, PSM.

Talk Description for Latha Ramanan and Savitha Gouda (Co-Presenters): The first Alexa device was introduced for invite only to customers in November 2014. We have since then released many successful Alexa devices in the market. We will discuss a brief history on Alexa; how we bring these devices to the market from concept to launch, and talk about Amazon’s product management process. In addition, we will also talk about how we work with Alexa to third party customers.

Monica Joshi, Senior Software Development Manager – Amazon Devices New Initiative
Monica is a Senior Software Development Manager an Amazon Devices New Initiative team. Monica joined Lab126 five years ago to manage the embedded software feature team on the Kindle eReader products –Paperwhite, Voyage and Oasis and. She also led the embedded platform team that built the Echo Dot product. Prior to Amazon, Monica held multiple leadership positions at Cisco Systems, building enterprise networking Ethernet switching products like the Catalyst 2900/3500 series. Monica has a Master’s in Electrical and Computer Engineering degree from Utah State University and an under graduate degree in Electrical Engineering from India.

Talk Description for Monica Joshi: She will be giving an overview of the Kindle eReader products and the engineering technologies behind it. Monica will also cover the challenges and fun aspects of working in the embedded software development space and unique aspects of what it means at Amazon Lab126.

Anna To, Principal Technical Program Manager – Alexa OS
Anna is a Principal Technical Program Manager on the Alexa OS team. She joined Amazon in June 2016. She worked with product management teams, user experience teams & engineering teams to launch Echo Show & Echo Spot, the new multi-modal Alexa device with features including video calling, video flash briefing and Alexa photo. She is part of the core team delivering the Multi Room Audio and Echo Spatial Perception features for Alexa customers. Prior to joining Amazon, she led engineering teams to build development platform for thousands of data storage engineers in Netapp for 5 years. Anna grew up in Hong Kong and moved to United States for her Master’s in Computer Science in University of Southern California. She started her tech career as a software engineer in the telecommunication industry and worked on different areas including router OS and state of the art video conferencing product in Cisco. Anna is also an avid skier, mother of two boys and is in active exploration of mindfulness.

Ambika Pajjuri, Senior Product Manager – Alexa
Ambika is a Senior Product Manager on the Alexa team. Ambika joined Amazon nearly 3 years ago and works on new Alexa devices and experiences. She currently leads exciting new consumer features like Amazon’s Multi-room music. Prior to joining Amazon, Ambika spent over 15 years working as a software tech lead, senior product manager and an entrepreneur at various consumer and networking companies (Airvana, 2Wire/Arris, Kidsenz). Ambika earned her Master’s in Electrical Engineering from Columbia University. Outside of work she enjoys hikes, travel and Bollywood dance.

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About Amazon:

Amazon Lab126 is an inventive San Francisco Bay Area research and development team that designs and engineers high-profile consumer electronic devices. We engineer devices like Fire tablets, Kindle e-readers, Amazon Fire TV, and Amazon Echo. As the Amazon devices team, we deliver instant access to everything—digital or physical—from anywhere, via delightfully unique Amazon experiences that make life easier and more fun.

Event Tickets & Details:

Tickets go onsale on Tuesday, February 13th, 2018 on Eventbrite.