Best of ELEVATE: You Don’t Have To Do It All Alone, Tips on Building Your LinkedIn Brand, Technical Interview Prep – and Rewriting the Rules of Career Comebacks!

ELEVATE speakers

On March 6-7, 2025, Girl Geek X founders Angie Chang and Sukrutha Bhadouria hosted over 2k women and allies globally tuning in for 2 full days of career and tech talks! We brought together thousands of mid-to-senior-level women in tech from across the globe.

This annual free online event was an extraordinary blend of inspiring talks, insightful sessions, and invaluable networking opportunities, designed to foster growth, innovation, and community among women in technology in celebration of International Women’s Day!

Here are ELEVATE 2025 highlights:

πŸš€ Leadership & Growth

  • Michelle Bozeman, coach at TBW Enterprises, spoke on reinventing yourself for unstoppable career growth. Re-watch Michelle Bozeman’s talk for details on how to redeem a complimentary coaching session with her!

πŸ’‘ Skills & Strategies

🌈 Diversity & Inclusion

πŸ’» Career Fair & Networking

  • Participants met with recruiters, hiring managers, and engineers from companies like Voxel51 and 18C. Author of The Silent Networker Elhannah Adekeye delivers her keynote on Networking for Introverts.

ELEVATE attendees left feeling energized and empowered to unify their talents to amplify success in their tech journeys.

Thank you to all our speakers, sponsors, and attendees for making this event truly unforgettable. Let’s continue to #LiftAsWeClimb and uplift women in tech everywhere! πŸ’ͺ #ElevateWomen

Here are the top 10 most engaging sessions from ELEVATE 2025 Conference & Career Fair ! You can watch them on our 2025 ELEVATE YouTube playlist:

#1 – Keynote: You Don’t Have to Do It All Alone: The Power of Letting Go to Accelerate Action β€“ Rachana Kumar, Former CTO at Etsy in conversation with Jenn Clevenger, VP of Engineering at Etsy

#2 – Tips On Building Your LinkedIn Brand – Lynne Williams, Executive Director at Career News Today

#3 – Rewriting the Rules of Career Comebacks – Alyson La, Data and AI Instructor, Tech-Moms

#4 – Navigating Career Growth and Change β€“ Margarita Akterskaia, Senior Software Engineer at Roblox

#5 – Realistic Tips for Breaking Into Cybersecurity – Betta Lyon-Desordo, Ethical Hacker at OnDefend

#6 – Stuck to Unstoppable: Reinventing Yourself for Unstoppable Career Growth – Michelle Bozeman (Coach and Executive Advisor, TBW Enterprises)

#7 – Cybersecurity and AI: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly – Rianat Abbas, Security Product Manager, AI-4AI

#8 – Code Assist with AI – Olga Khylkouskaya, Staff Software Engineer at Google

#9 – LeetCode Solve: DFS vs BFS Approaches to Binary Trees – Krys Flores, Staff Software Engineer at Crunchyroll

#10 – Voxel51 Employer Intro – Remy Schor, Recruiter at Voxel51, Josh Leven, VP of Engineering at Voxel51, Lanny Wang, Software Engineer at Voxel51

Industry/Engineering Talks: (YouTube playlist)

#1 – Beyond Senior: Demystifying the Role of a Principal/Staff Engineer – Shweta Venkateswaran, Principal Software Engineer at Splunk

#2 – The Mid Senior Trap – Danielle McLaughlin, CEO at 18C

#3 – Code Assist with AI – Olga Khylkouskaya, Staff Software Engineer at Google

#4 – Get Unblocked Faster: How To Ask Questions Like a Journalist – Rachel Kaufman, Software Engineer at Attentive

#5 – Building Your Brand Through DEI: A Personal Journey to Professional Growth – Dona Maria Jose, Senior Software Engineer at Slack

#6 – Navigating Career Growth and Change – Margarita Akterskaia, Senior Software Engineer at Roblox

#7 – Tips On Building Your LinkedIn Brand – Lynne Williams, Executive Director at Career News Today

#8 – Code, Climb and Conquer: Mastering Menopause in Tech – Annie Gaudreault, Nutritionist and Women’s Health Coach at Veev Wellness

#9 – The Future of Rendering: Server-Driven UI (SDUI) – Surbhi Madan, Senior Software Engineer at Google

#10 – LeetCode Solve: DFS vs BFS Approaches to Binary Trees – Krys Flores, Staff Software Engineer at Crunchyroll

Breaking Into Tech/Cybersecurity/Career Talks: (YouTube playlist)

#1 – Rewriting the Rules of Career Comebacks – Alyson La, Data and AI Instructor, Tech-Moms

#2 – Realistic Tips for Breaking Into Cybersecurity – Betta Lyon-Desordo, Ethical Hacker at OnDefend

#3 – Certifications: Yay or Nay? – Sheila Vida, Principal Security Customer Success Specialist at Cisco

#4 – Navigating Career Growth and Change – Margarita Akterskaia, Senior Software Engineer at Roblox

#5 – Tips On Building Your LinkedIn Brand – Lynne Williams, Executive Director at Career News Today

#6 – Code Assist with AI – Olga Khylkouskaya, Staff Software Engineer at Google

#7 – LeetCode Solve: DFS vs BFS Approaches to Binary Trees – Krys Flores, Staff Software Engineer at Crunchyroll

#8 – Keynote: Networking for Introverts – Elhannah Adekeye, Author of The Silent Networker: An Introvert’s Guide To Networking

#9 – Stuck to Unstoppable: Reinventing Yourself for Unstoppable Career Growth – Michelle Bozeman (Coach and Executive Advisor , TBW Enterprises)

#10 – The Guide to Highlighting Your Wins Externally – Mamta Suri, Engineering Leader

Leadership Talks: (YouTube playlist)

#1 – Keynote: You Don’t Have to Do It All Alone: The Power of Letting Go to Accelerate Action β€“ Rachana Kumar, Former CTO at Etsy in conversation with Jenn Clevenger, VP of Engineering at Etsy

#2 – Leading Against the Grain: The Journey to Leadership Amidst Challenges and Stereotypes – Elena Leonova, CPO at Spryker

#3 – Keynote: The Power of Collective Imagination – Kimberly D. Jones, CEO at Kelton Legend and Senior Director of Talent Strategy

#4 – PM as GM: A Position or A Mindset – Ipsita Basu, Product Lead at Shopify

#5 – Sur-Thriving Cybersecurity Burnout – Dana Hehl, VP of Services Delivery at Anvil Secure

#6 – Community Building and Lessons in Viral Fame – Saba Moeel, Visual and Product Designer at Pink Cat Daily

#7 – The Guide to Highlighting Your Wins Externally – Mamta Suri, Engineering Leader

#8 – Beyond Senior: Demystifying the Role of a Principal/Staff Engineer – Shweta Venkateswaran, Principal Software Engineer at Splunk

#9 – Turning Glue Work to Your Advantage – Julia Furst Morgado, Global Technologist at Veeam

#10 – Leading Through Change: Guiding Your Team to Embrace Transformation – Dipti Patel, Data Engineering Manager at Zoro

Thank You To ELEVATE 2025 Supporters – They Are Hiring!

Special thank you to our supporters at Voxel51 and 18C for recruiting from the Girl Geek X community of mid-to-senior level technical women. We can’t wait to help another girl geek get her next job in tech.

Don’t forget to check out featured jobs from Voxel51 and 18C!

The conference theme is β€œLift As You Climb.” Speakers from Google, Slack, Cisco, Shopify, Splunk, and more companies spoke and answered questions, sharing career advice with attendees during their sessions, often welcoming connections on LinkedIn.

If your company is looking to recruit more women this year, please don’t let them miss out on our next ELEVATE Virtual Conference & Career Fair sponsorship opportunity in March 2026 celebrating International Women’s Day!

In addition to virtual events, we partner with companies monthly on Girl Geek Dinners in the San Francisco Bay Area, booking now for 2025 dates.

Please email sponsors@girlgeek.io and we’ll be in touch.

Thank you in advance!

Angie Chang, Sukrutha Bhadouria, Amy Weicker, Amanda Beaty and the team at Girl Geek X

2025 March ELEVATE Speakers headshots

ELEVATE 2025 – Employer Intro – Voxel51

Voxel51 employees share about the company’s culture, values, and mission, as well as the opportunities for growth and development within the organization. From an open source project to an enterprise product, Voxel51’s visual AI is used worldwide in academic research labs, startups, and Fortune 10 companies. A fully-remote Series B startup, they are building a platform that empowers machine learning teams to create more accurate, less biased AI across a number of exciting fields (healthcare, security, self-driving cars).

VOXEL51 IS HIRING!

Please consider applying at the links above!

Got questions? You can email recruiter Remy (remy@voxel51.com) or connect with Remy on LinkedIn, and/or email VPE Josh (josh@voxel51.com) or connect with him on LinkedIn.

From an open source project to an enterprise product, Voxel51’s visual AI is used worldwide in academic research labs, startups, and Fortune 10 companies. The engineering team is growing!

TRANSCRIPT

Remy Schor: I’ll start by just offering some basics about who we are. Series B, we raised our series B last April. Foundationally, we build a tool for tool who people who make AI, so visual AI engineers. What I really like to talk about, and I’m gonna ask to Josh to speak a little bit about our business and talk a little bit about the culture.

Remy Schor: What I really like to talk about is from a sort of collective community standpoint – we are completely distributed. We have folks all over the US and Canada, currently just in North America. We’re all within a couple of time zones of each other, so we were able to sync quite regularly throughout the week, and then we communicate asynchronously with Slack.

In terms of the team and how we’ve grown, we are now almost 50 people, which is a really exciting and a turning point for us. Josh is gonna talk a little bit more about just statistically how we’ve gotten there, but I can say sort of spoiler alert that we doubled our headcount over the last 12 months exactly. Both Josh and I are new since then, new in that interim period, but, you know, have been heads down growing engineering and, and some go-to-market strategy hiring as well.

I’ll just circle back to the piece that I started to started to talk about with respect toour distributed environment. We really believe that people do their best work when they’re in a comfortable space, and for most people, that’s some version of home, home office, coffee, local coffee shop, local WeWork, what what have you.

What what we really do by allowing people to work where they’re most comfortable is we meet them right where with, with we meet them where they are with whatever they’re working on professionally and then also personally Whether it’s having pets, I’m not sure if you all could just hear my dog barking, I’m hoping no one could hear her. Awesome. Basically accommodate, right?

We are inclusive through accommodation, whether that’s people dealing with pets, they’re pet parents or they’re people parents or they’re, you know, taking care of of other folks and their families and their lives, managing extracurriculars, right? Continuing to learn, having that growth mindset. And so I think we really have created an environment where all of that is quite encouraged and supported. Josh?

Josh Leven: Yeah. Awesome. Thank you Remy. Hi everyone, I’m Josh, VP of engineering at Voxel51. Lemme just start by giving you just some basics about our engineering team. As Remy said, we’re fully remote all in North American time zones. We have 20 engineers today that are divided up into four squads of three to six people, three to seven.. actually we just hired one.

Our tech stacks are Python on the backend and TypeScript everywhere, but that’s I guess how TypeScript works. We are not so much a SaaS product, we’re primarily deployed into our customer’s cloud or on-prem. Our customers care very deeply about the security of their data and so they prefer to keep that in their own in environment, and so we again meet them where they are to help them be successful. As Remy said, I’m also relatively new, joined about six months ago. Lanny here is the elder statesman in this conversation,

I just wanted to share a little bit about the biggest reasons for me to join and one of those is really the impact that the product has. As you’ve probably noticed, the AI revolution is coming or maybe even already here. What we get to do is enable those teams that are building AI models to build models that are less biased, more safe, more reliable, more accurate. It helps them get this new magic out into the world in a way that helps everybody. And, and we’re helping in a ton of different industries, healthcare, autonomous vehicles, robotics, agriculture, retail, sports, and more that I’m not even listing.

We’re also not just for big companies. We have a vibrant open source community, include students and researchers and academia to machine learning professionals. And, and of course we do have a growing community of enterprise customers. Another thing I really love about working here is we’re we’re not just building a great product, but we’re also making big investments into innovation. Remy mentioned that series B we raised last year and we used some of that money to hire up a team of machine learning, pure research folk led by one of our co-founders, Jason, who’s a research professor at University of Michigan.

And what’s great is that they do this groundbreaking research that we then get to incorporate into the product, and being able to talk about the stuff that they’re doing is, is one of the ways we continue to be a part of like the conversation in cutting edge artificial intelligence. It’s not just for like marketing purposes, not just for the product.

We, we also wanna include everyone at the company. Every week we have a meeting called ML paper review, or every other week, where someone will take one of these papers that’s in the cutting edge of research and present it to the company so we can all grow and learn. All right. With that, let me hand things over to Lanny, one of the engineers on our team working most directly with the machine learning team and she can talk more about what it’s like to work here.

Lanny Wang: Yeah. Hi, my name is Lanny. I’ve been working at Voxel51 for two years and a half. I worked on the open source app and in the enterprise as well. Working in Voxel51, I feel one thing I really enjoy is actually working with people who are actually kind and very respectful. It is just a pleasure to like work with them and we work in a very remote setting, but you never feel like you’re working actually in silo.

We communicate a lot and for me, I feel I actually know all the engineers, not only the one within my squad on every topic. Whenever I think it, people who are relevant always, they’re super happy to when I reach out to them and have a good discussion. Also, the second point is I think we enjoy certain level of autonomy of being able to come up with the solution and the design of fixing something ourself and we have that trust among the team and having that flexibility.

Third, being in the rapidly growing space for AI and I feel in every squad, we’re able to tackle the most up to date problems in the industry. And that for me, like I feel very driven and excited for tackling those problems there. That’s the MLE, like they need the tools they’re facing every day. That get me very passionate and enthusiastic about the problem I’m solving.

Also the company, I feel we value the transparency and clarity a lot.

It’s not only we try to bring that from data insights, but also I feel within the org and engineers ourselves too, we try to have all the docs and meetings so it’s easy to find records even if it happened async, like we’re in there at the moment. Also as engineer, every year I think we can pick a conference to go, and previously I have been going to the CVPR, and today one of my coworkers shared a great news with me. He had a paper got accepted by ICML 2025 related to climate AI. He’s actually a software engineer, he’s not an MLE, so that’s really exciting. And that’s my perspective for working as an engineer in Voxel51.

Angie Chang: Great. This is the time that we normally go into breakout rooms, but I think today, since we have only two companies joining us and one of them is sick/out today, we’ll just stay here and I’ll ask you all more questions that I have prepared. But first I wanted to see if anyone else has a question in the chat or if you wanna raise your hand.

Remy Schor: Can I preemptively say that I’m gonna put my email address in the chat? People are starting to message me with my name. It’s gonna be hard for me to keep up so let me go ahead and put my email address in there right now, and if you do have a question or a curiosity after this meeting, you’re welcome to just shoot me an email directly. That would be really helpful. If you’re gonna do that, include your LinkedIn profile. Thank you.

Angie Chang: Great. So I’m looking through the chat and there is a questio. Are there opportunities for technical writing roles, documentation, or similar. Asked by Nessa.

Remy Schor: Nessa’s note is what prompted me to say let me share my email right now. Let me outline the roles we have open at the moment. Keeping in mind we are a small organization, we are hiring in a very disciplined capacity and we are hiring in a very disciplined capability. We are hiring and we are continuing to hire.

We have a Principal Engineering role open. This is full stack – I need somebody who has React and Python, that that’s the game plan, it’s principal level so they have to have some combination of hands-on coding, a desire to continue to write production code, architecture, design and mentoring. We’re not too married to number of years of experience, but this is a very senior position, so it’s not gonna be appropriate for somebody who’s early in their career.

I am hiring for a pretty nuanced Machine Learning Engineer This is specifically a machine learning engineer who wants to spend their time largely interacting with our enterprise clients. Not in a solutions capacity, right? I’ll clarify, we don’t have a services division, we’re not solving problems for our end user, but we are creating solutions with them. And so that’s really what this person will be doing 80% of the time. This machine learning engineer, ideally computer vision engineer, is relationship managing and, and solving problems with our users.

And then we have an SDR role open, which if y’all know an SDR that’s a sales dev sales development representative, it’s typically gonna be like a pretty non-senior salesperson. Somebody who does a lot of the basic kind of cold emailing, warm emailing, introducing.. If you’ve ever been pitched a something, a software solution, it’s probably those pitches are coming from SDRs. It’s a heavy lifting role, but it’s a really good way to break into software sales. And so typically we’d be looking for somebody with about a year’s worth of experience as an SDR – a little bit more flexibility with that one, if anybody has any questions about those roles specifically, that’s what I’m gonna about to put my email address in the chat to answer, and you’re welcome to reach out directly.

Angie Chang: The next question that I see here is, how does product management fit into AI industries?

Josh Leven: That sounds like a Josh question. Yeah, so I I don’t see who asked that, but just to clarify, you’re asking like, how do we use…

Angie Chang: Susan G?

Josh Leven: Susan awesome. Susan, are you asking how do we use product management to deliver what we’re building? Or are you asking how we see our customers using it? Awesome. Yeah, so we, we use it I don’t think in a particularly innovative way. Our product manager still does the sort of things you would expect, gathering ideas and insights from our customers, from people internal to the company, from wherever else ideas can come from, works those ideas into something more concrete and solutions to actual problems and puts ’em through like a product development process.

They’ll go through design, they’ll get verified, like we’ll put it those designs in front of our customers and get their feedback. They’ll work with the engineers to break it down into tickets. And then of course there’s on the more research side, during that kind of ideation phase, there’s a conversation that happens about where do we see potential research complementing a feature like this?

What’s something we can do to build this feature? Not really like just the way a competitor might build it, but in an innovative way or give it capabilities that nobody else in the industry has. Or sometimes it’s even like, what are we seeing our customers trying to do that we think we might be able to research a solution for them so that they can achieve their goals through us more easily than having to build it themselves. How did I do Susan? Does that basically answer your question? Awesome, thanks so much for asking.

Angie Chang: The next question I see is about the interviewing process from Laura. Curious about your thoughts on multiple round interviews, “some companies have up to six rounds”…

Remy Schor: Yeah, I can take that one. I’m actually just scrolling up to see if I can identify… Okay, Laura. Got it. Yeah, so it does depend on the open role, right? How many rounds we do? I will say that I think we work very hard to be quite thoughtful about utilizing the candidate’s time appropriately, and making sure that we’re getting enough information so that we can make an informed decision. Josh in particular is probably the most thoughtful interviewer I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with. Don’t tell my other executives that I said that. It’s really extraordinary. I mean truly I’ve been recruiting for 20 years and I feel I’ve learned more from Josh in the last six months as a point person hiring manager than probably anybody in my whole career, so that’s been really great. Maybe I should let him answer this question here.

Here’s what I’ll say for a leadership role. Yeah there’s probably gonna be six rounds. We’re we, we don’t, you know, often assign any type of take home technical tests. That’s not really our approach. We want realtime conversational, resembles a day-to-day situation type in interview process. But you know, you gotta meet both co-founders, right? And you have to meet Josh probably twice. He is the VP and if you’re interviewing for a very senior role, I would wanna meet him more than once, right?

He’s gonna be your direct manager. That’s four conversations right there. Plus you still wanna meet at least one or two engineers from the team in some capacity. So there’s your six. If I’m a senior, if I’m a software engineering manager orto some extent possibly this principal engineer, I mean that, to me that feels pretty reasonable even though it sounds like a big number.

What I will say is we, I manage all of recruiting, including scheduling, and I’m relentless with scheduling. Josh can attest, so if there’s a positive signal and both parties are quite interested, even though there might be a number of steps, they can happen rather quickly and we do our very best to schedule them in a very appropriate manageable amount of time. Typically I shy away from setting up individual interviews that are more than 90 minutes. I think that starts to get a little too lengthy, but it’s possible to meet two separate people on the same day.

I will say for anybody in this market right now, and anybody who’s sort of earlier in their career, y’all don’t, y’all maybe don’t know what it used to be like. You used to have to go on site to the company’s actual office, even if you didn’t live in their city and sit for eight, you know, hours of interviews for a whole day. That’s what it, that’s what it was like.

It’s obviously not like that anymore. We do everything virtually and so we make it accessible even though it may feel like quite a few steps for a non-leadership non very senior role, try to keep it to three or four steps. There’s just fewer people to meet at that level. Hopefully that answers your question, Laura. If any clarifications are needed, by all means. For the record, I have nothing to add to that, Remy,

Remy Schor: You remember, Josh, probably back in the day having to put on a suit, go to an office, you know, sit in front of a bunch of people you didn’t know for hours and hours, maybe eat lunch with them. I don’t know, it was like a totally different scene.

Josh Leven: Interviewing virtually is quite a delight. I remember my first jobs were in New York where I did have to put on a suit and then I moved out to California and I went to my first interview in a suit and everyone was very confused and never did it again.

Remy Schor: Yeah, that, that’s true. There are definite coastal differences, and also just, I mean it’s just, everything’s changed now.

Angie Chang: We have a question from Julissa that says, can you talk about the ML AI stack? Are you hosting your own training models or leveraging third party providers? And if so, which ones?

Josh Leven: Yeah, yeah, great question. I may not know this as well as Lanny, so Lanny, please correct me if I get this wrong, or do you know the answer? And you can just answer it.

Lanny Wang: We are data centric, so we actually are open and very flexible., so in people’s AI stack, like we are not the throttle that you would have. We integrate with all the popular tools actually.

Josh Leven: Yeah, exactly. You can easily like load and apply pre-trained models. We have this thing called the Model Zoo that’s full of models that you can just kind of grab and run using the system. And then we have, as Lanny said, all sorts of integrations, but we’re not directly as like part of our system like hosting models on any kind of external provider.

Angie Chang: There’s a question from Garima about a tech program manager role. Is there any maybe opening in the future?

Remy Schor: No, I mean that’s the kind of thing… it’s pretty tough to predict exactly what we’ll be hiring for in 2026. That’s not on the map for 2025, but email me.

Angie Chang: A question from Ashley. What are you looking for as a culture fit?

Lanny Wang: Yeah, I think first of all, like being a genuine person to communicate with because no one like to work with like assholes. And then second being also able to work very independently because we are trying to solve the issues that we’re working with like to a certain degree level because we are remote and so being able to, to get deep into the things and push it forward yourself, that’s and also when there is an issue, I love that in general here, rather than complaining about it, usually people look at, okay, what things need to be done and then we start working on it.

Josh Leven: Yeah, thanks Lanny. I’ll add one or two things to that. It’s really important that we’re building a a culture every new person you hire adds to the culture, right? It’s important we’re building a culture that is low ego.

We’re not looking for people who think they have all the answers, but ones who are good at collaborating with their squad and helping to pull out everyone’s great ideas and have the best ones rise to the top. And yeah, a able to have like really good collaboration and productive conversations, willing to jump in and, and help one another, cause as much as people do like to get heads down when they run into an issue, they’re quick to post it on Slack as they should be, and there is always an outpouring of people be like, “Oh, have you tried this? Have you tried that? Lemme jump in…” and it’s really important.

What we’re building is complicated and building it to work with every possible customer scenario makes it even more complicated. And so there’s a lot of wisdom on the team, people who’ve been there a lot longer than me who are able to help everybody navigate that.

Remy Schor: I’ll just add a personal theory or philosophy I have is that if somebody has demonstrated the capacity to care deeply about something in their life, right? And whether it’s an extracurricular, could be a sport, could be they don’t even have to be playing. Like they absolutely love the Lakers. Like if they, if somebody demonstrates to me in the first conversation that they have passion for something, I believe then that they can have passion for their job. And so that’s like a really good signal for me typically.

If there is an opportunity in your interviews to just tie something back to what you do on the weekends, right? The manager mentions a book that you happen to have read or something like that, right? You know, even if, even if you’re just asking the person, Hey, what do you do on the weekends?

What are you looking forward to doing this weekend? And you can tie that back to what you do personally for me, that’s a really good signal. I do look for that. It’s, it’s part of what differentiates people, right? And people hire people, so be a person.

Angie Chang: Okay. I am gonna ask a question about the hiring process. Does Voxel51 focus primarily on visual AI and computer vision models, from what they saw on the website? Or do you also work with data models in other AI domains?

Josh Leven: Yeah, great question. So right now we are 100% focused on computer vision use cases. Is that always gonna be the case? Can’t say, but, but right now that is really our focus. And I can say this confidently, that’s gonna be our focus this year, but we’re always having conversations about other places we can expand into. It’s a really exciting space, and the the kind of things that we do, which is basically help to people to leverage their data to build great models is not specific to visual AI, so there’s a lot of opportunity there.

Angie Chang: Great. So question from Laura about the interview process. Wait, did we already do that? Sorry, it just keeps jiggling this little chat window. A question. Can you from Abigail, could you talk a bit more about the AI privacy or security issues you’re tackling?

Josh Leven: Hmm. So Abigail, when you say the ones that we’re tackling, do you mean I feel like I’m asking the same question I asked before, Are you saying like the privacy and security issues that we tackle for our own software, or how we help our customers with the privacy and privacy and security of the AI they’re building? Sure.

Because we deploy everything into our customer’s clouds and into their prem, our issues about AI privacy and security aren’t so big. And the, I mean certainly when we make our own models, we’re very thoughtful about what data we’re using to train it. I mean, using data to train models is kind of the thing that we do and help to do, and we’re certainly like not taking proprietary data or we’re, we’re not like we’re being very responsible about the data that we use to, to train the models that we do, but the, the application that we make full of the, the pre-trained models and the models that our customers are making using the data, it’s because it’s all on-prem.

We don’t have to worry so much about their data, or data leaking through our product to go anywhere. In fact, we have a number of customers that have like a fully air gapped solution that of ours that they use. I guess one of the things that we do is we build an air gap solution, so to just kind of eliminate any concerns the customers could have about how we’re handling privacy and security, which I should add the team built before I joined and and was a huge effort. Lanny and the rest of the team should be very proud of that. It’s not most companies that at our scale that have an air gap solution and it’s been a great advantage for us in the industry to be able to offer that.

Angie Chang: Someone asked about technical interviews.What are your thoughts on using HackerRank style interviews, given AI tools like Copilot, something developers use on a regular basis for a developer productivity?

Josh Leven: Oh, can I..

Remy Schor: Well, I was just gonna say, I just don’t care for HackerRank style interviews. I think they don’t appropriately mirror the day-to-day life of an engineer looks like. Furthermore, it’s essentially, it’s a test you can prepare effectively for HackerRank style questions or LeetCode style questions, but I don’t really think it’s doing anybody any favors.

I will say, and maybe, I mean I want Josh to answer this ’cause he’s excited and that makes me happy, but if you’re ever using AI in an interview, the interviewer knows, it doesn’t matter if you think they don’t know, they know. Now, they may have said you can, which is fine by all means, but you’re never like getting away with it just FYI I don’t think that Deepti that you’re trying to, I’m just saying like for everybody, overwhelmingly, if you are as a recruiter, what I see a lot is, I’ll jump into a first conversation and the person won’t have done research, which is a different conversation for a different time, and I can see that they’re looking us up real time and reading to me what we do.

And I have to time out. I don’t need you to pitch me right, tell, I have to like backtrack. So I, we can always tell when you’re using your computer to look up something up, whether it’s AI or not, Josh.

Josh Leven: Yeah. So to totally agree with that. I’m very much against those sort of HackerRank/LeetCode style interviews, with or without AI. When I think of technical interviews, my goal is to put you in an environment that is as similar as possible to what you’ll be doing day to day, right? So if you code with AI, then you should be coding with AI, right? If you’re normally able to use whatever libraries you want, and Google answers to things, and talk something through with somebody else, then all of that should be available to you in the interview.

And so that’s kind of how we like to structure the coding part of the technical interview.

It’s like as close as possible to like pairing with a colleague in your own environment on the language that you’re most comfortable with on a problem that like is not a LeetCode problem, that we can have a conversation about trade-offs and software design and like all the sort of things that you normally have conversations with your teammates about when you’re actually completing a ticket. And that’s what the technical interview’s about for us.

Angie Chang: I guess we can go on to our questions that we came up with, if nobody else is gonna ask questions, I’ll ask questions. What are some qualities and experiences that make someone successful at Voxel51?

Remy Schor: Yeah, I mean I think it’s a combination of some of what we’ve already shared. Certainly, curiosity, right? Definitely, passion for what we’re building. I don’t know that you have to come in with that. I mean, it certainly helps, but once you get the lay of the land, like really diving in and, and wanting to be here, and wanting to be part of what we’re building, being kind and thoughtful, I think to be sure, you know,

I am nine out of 10, 99 out of a hundred times the very first person that somebody interacts with with respect to Voxel51. And so from a candidate standpoint, and so there are some things that are important to me, right? Like, I don’t care if you’re running late, I do need you to let me know, right? As an example, right? And again, things happen, issues pop up occasionally I’m running late, right? Like I get it, we all have, but that being like transparent and communicating is really important.

I had another point I was gonna make, well I mentioned curiosity because I think that’s the big one, really understanding the why behind what we’re building and then kind of bringing your own, bringing your own why to the table, Josh?

Josh Leven: Yeah, the that’s great. The, the only thing I would add is, we are still very much a startup. We’re not planning like multiple quarters ahead in detail, although only we have like a broad roadmap plan. Like things come up in like a partnership or a customer, and we surprisingly need to drop everything and jump on that. So having a certain level of flexibility if you’re used to more of a big company job where things are all laid out and nothing ever interrupts your sprints, like we do everything we can to not interrupt the sprint, like we do try to respect that, but, much more than other places, things are gonna come up, and people who can get excited that, “oh man, you know, if we switch gears right here, we have this huge opportunity,” you’re gonna be a lot happier than if you get frustrated every time something comes up.

Angie Chang: We have a question from Abby. What types of companies do y’all hope to work with, and what tasks are the AI used for?

Remy Schor: I mean Oh yeah, Lanny you go.

Lanny Zhang: We work with a wide range of industries from autonomous driving to the defense, and from modern agriculture to robotics, so it’s very satisfying. Like sometimes seeing the customer success engineer post… the abstraction of the problem, like the customer encounter and see the scenario that like we were able to help. Yeah. It doesn’t… we don’t really have a specific setting or a specific industry that we’re anchored to. It’s really a wide range of applications that can on issues that we can solve from visual AI. Any AI industry that work with visual images, videos, 3D point cloud, et cetera, we can work with that.

Angie Chang: I have a question… What ways does Voxel51 engage with the open source community to drive the data centric AI revolution?

Josh Leven: What a well-phrased question. First, every way. Yeah. Sorry, Remy, did you wanna start answering?

Remy Schor: In every way. But Josh, you go ahead.

Josh Leven: Oh yeah, I mean, I’ll name a couple of ways. Like we, we have a vibrant Discord that we maintain to like support people in their 51 journey. We have a whole bunch of events, meetups, hackathons, man, actually trying to think of all the stuff, like we have a whole community slash dev rel team that just spends a hundred percent of their time supporting our community. I couldn’t possibly… someone else jump in and remember all the other things that they do.

Lanny Zhang: Yeah. And also on GitHub, we actually have a very active community. We have this thing called 51 plugins that allows to transform. So a lot of the MLEs, they know Python really well, but they don’t write React or Typescript, but they hope to use the app to make a little tweak and then they can use it better. So that plugin system allows them to use Python code to generate that UI to build their unique workflow for them and they will share it on GitHub. So that allow us to see, hey, what people are, are working on, what’s the need? And we do work with the engineers there to just bring the new features in and merge new things from the community, so it’s a very active community.

Angie Chang: Out of curiosity, why is the product called 51?

Lanny Zhang: I listened to one of the podcasts done by Jason and Brian and they did talk about the name Voxel51. Where it come from Voxel is the pixel in the video setting, a three dimensional setting. And then 51 came from the unknown, the alien zone 51. So it’s meaning that we’re exploring some unknown. I think that’s the true answer.

Josh Leven: I was given a different answer years later when I joined. Voxel still means voxel, a 3D Pixel, but I said, you know, our product helps you find a needle in a haystack. So you know, if you have a thousand needles, which needle is it that you’re looking for? Maybe it’s needle 51.

Angie Chang: Okay. From Angela, what is the workflow from customer request to end solution? Is the data a mix of synthetic and annotated? And as a part of that process, are you also working with human annotators?

Josh Leven: Okay, I think I can answer this. If you’re talking about what does the customer, what’s the customer workflow as they’re using us to solve their problem, and how does annotation connect with that? Am I getting that right, Angela? So when you say customer request, it makes me think like they’re asking us to do something, but really it’s, I think it’s, yeah, so I’m, I’m gonna answer that question.

Customers, they come to us typically because they have a ton of data and they want to use that data to make an AI model. Sometimes they’ve been trying to make an AI model with that data and they just can’t get it accurate enough. It’s got blind spots, it has issues and they need our product’s help to get it over the finish line. And so they use our product to explore the data and understand stands, right? So, you know, there’s training data and test data and so they’ll look through the data to see like what’s missing in their training data that is preventing the model from learning the things it needs to learn to have a full solution that covers all cases, is like less biased, is accurate in more situations.

And so our product helps to kind of highlight those gaps for them so they can figure out what additional data, for example, they need to get labeling for. And then they can label it and then add it to their training set. And then they use that to train the model and then they check the accuracy of the model again. And there’s this like virtuous loop. As the model gets better and better, then we highlight more and more subtle areas where it can improve and they get more labeling and they improve and they and so that’s, that’s kind of the cycle there.

We’ve got some cool things in the works for how we can help support the annotation side of that that we’ll be announcing later this year. But for now, we really kind of stay out of the annotation business. We are partners with a whole bunch of annotation companies and so when it comes to the annotation part, they’ll just ship the metadata over to to them and they’ll get the labels and they’ll import the labels over to 51, and the cycle continues.

Angie Chang: The next question from Abigail is super loosely around what percentage of employees at Voxel51 are women or or non-binary?

Remy Schor: 25%.

Angie Chang: Great. So that’s the last question I see in the chat. I’ll ask a question that we had prepared. Does your company support lateral career moves such as switching between engineering, product or management roles?

Josh Leven: Yeah, absolutely. You know, it’s a very much case by case basis, but we’ve had people move in many directions. We’ve had conversations with people about movement as well. It’s my job as a a leader and the managers of my team, it’s our job to support you in the growth of whatever direction you want to take your career. Hopefully that’s something that we can do within the company, but you know, if not, then I think part of our job is to help you make that leap from us to the right place for you to continue that growth.

Angie Chang: And how does Voxel51 support in new employees during the onboarding process?

Remy Schor: Well, I think bigger picture, it’s maybe not yet totally a scalable process because our COO, who’s incredible, spends like the first half of the first day with every single person who starts. There’s only one of him and he has 100,000 other responsibilities, so I’m trying to talk to start the conversation about how we can make more scalable iterative onboarding. But it’s going to be a combination currently of our COO, getting the person situated on day one and then handing them off to their direct manager and the manager will takeover setting up, you know, ensuring that they have all their appropriate one-on-ones. They meet everybody, they get ramped up, they have the right curriculum.

Another thing that our developer relations team does earlier, someone had asked how we interact with our open source community. And the answer is, you know, as Josh and Lanny both, both said, there’s a lot of avenues, one of which is we have a dedicated computer vision dev rel team. They create a lot of curriculum and content. So even before someone starts, if they want to, they can like watch the Coursera course on Voxel51, they can checkout our LinkedIn Learning Lab. There’s resources out there. I believe that those also help with the onboarding. We do twice weekly all hands, so no matter when you start during a week, typically it’s a Monday, you’ll get introduced to the entire community real time virtually, and there’s like a whole series of like shoutouts and introductions and stuff.

Angie Chang: I’m gonna read another question from the chat, Melissa asked how does Voxel advise customers on infrastructure as well as eg computing, power, memory storage, and how often do infra needs change as models, amount of models, or nature of model data grow?

Josh Leven: Yeah, this is a great question. We do absolutely there.. That’s a big part of the onboarding process for new customers is advising them on how to scale their infrastructure and helping them to get it right and helping them to adjust it over time. As those needs change, it’s absolutely something we do. We have a infrastructure team and that helps set those kind of standards and advise and as we continue to develop, like this year we have a big initiative for performance, we revise those guidelines to say, oh, you know, if you wanna take advantage of these performance improvements, you’re gonna need more cores on these machines and yada yada. So it’s an ongoing developing thing that is a central part of how we setup customers for success.

Angie Chang: A question from Abby, looking at y’all’s open source library and GitHub, can this tool be used to process non-visual data like observability metrics or complex texts?

Josh Leven: So with the caveat that Lanny mentioned that we have a very powerful plugin system that you can do quite a lot with. The core product right now is just images, video, 3D meshes, point clouds and other kind of visual media. But your question leads us to the same thinking that we have.. the same approaches we’re taking could be expanded to other formats.

Angie Chang: Thank you for that. Angela asks and says thank you, it helps on the scope of the product. She notice defense work as part of the modeling. Are you also looking at red team and pixelated attacks? Are you also suggesting emergent models to clients?

Josh Leven: As far as like emergent models, if I’m understanding that correctly, we, the Models Zoo, that I mentioned, we try to stay pretty up to date on that, so whenever new like industry models get released, we are quick to add them to the zoo so everybody can get access to them and run them really easily inside of 51, we the, like the customer success team and Remy was talking about, we’re looking to hire one more person for that team. They certainly do advise all of our customers on best practices and strategies and approaches that they may want to take to help make their work as successful as possible. They are more expert in me on what strategies they recommend when, so I can’t answer that particular question.

Angie Chang: Athena asks, how doyou maintain transparency and collaboration while managing a remote team?

Josh Leven: So I don’t wanna just assume I should talk, but…

Remy Schor: Go for it.

Josh Leven: Okay. Thanks. Maintaining transparency is like a constant vigilance. I think that’s like, part of the responsibility of leadership, to go out of their way to be sharing context, and being transparent about decisions and directions and possible directions. That’s just a kind of decision that we make at the leadership team. One of the reasons I was excited to join as a VP here is because I knew that was a core value of the leadership team and it’s a basically a non-negotiable for me. I don’t know how to lead a team without being transparent, so I think you get just like, everything just gets easier if you’re willing to put in the time to be transparent with folks. I guess the rest of the leadership team agrees, so we do that.

Collaboration remotely is tricky and it’s something that we are always talking about and iterating on, particularly remote across different time zones, and I think part of it is just figuring out what are the key touch points where collaboration is most valuable. We do our regular sprint ceremonies, and like planning out the work we’re gonna do for the next couple weeks in a sprint is an important touch point for collaboration as well as figuring out like, where do we need more collaboration in order to figure these tickets out, or come up with a plan or, one of the squads, the backend squad is doing a lot of tricky performance work right now, and there’s a couple people get together and do a brainstorming session, write up a doc, and then that they’ll share the doc and then everyone comes together and discusses the doc and gives feedback.

It’s really about just like creating the right habits and processes and figuring out those touch points. I’m always a big fan of pushing for just code pairing and and just sitting next to each other virtually and pairing on a problem, whether it’s coding or writing up a doc or whiteboarding or whatever. And then, like I said, time zones become tricky because all right, well one person ends their day at 2:00 PM the other person’s day, and so someone’s working solo for three hours, and then the other person you’re pairing with wakes up three hours before you, and so making sure you have a clean handoff and a plan. It’s a lot of communication, a lot of thinking ahead, a lot of just being thoughtful.

Angie Chang: Thank you for that. I see a question here from Julissa. Is the open source project the same one offered to clients? And how important is the open source aspect to the product?

Remy Schor: I mean, I’m not an engineer, but I’d be happy to jump in and answer this unless Lanny wants to take it. Maybe I’ll give my answer and Josh and Lanny can, can hold me accountable in case I’m missing something. This is what I typically tell candidates. We are open source, we remain very committed to being an open source community. Our open source tool is single user and local install, so it’s quite limited in the sense that you can only work with a visual data set as large as what your laptop can handle.

Three-ish years ago, we launched our enterprise solution. The enterprise solution is how we’ve monetized. The main feature differential right now is that it’s a teams version of the open source tool. It’s a collaborative tool that also allows you, I mean in so doing it allows you to work with your team in your cloud in the same large scale visual data sets, which is kind of solving its own problem, but that’s the ubiquity, it’s more scalable, it’s more performant, more secure, right? There’s enhanced security and you know, forthcoming additional features. But that open source product, while sort of part of who we are just at our core, also drives and energizes users into the enterprise tool, right?

Individual engineers find the open source tool, they love it, they energize, and a lot of cases have in fact come to us asking to uplevel to the enterprise solution. There’s still obviously a sales cycle, but it’s nice when they’ve already heard about us, they already know they like the tool. I miss anything?

Lanny Zhang: Yeah, and I think previously it’s… we emphasized more on the collaboration, user management and security side, but I think started from this year, we added more advanced features that for instance, with data quality panel and model valuation panel, these advanced features will tap better into the enterprise solution for industries, better scoping their specific problems. Yeah. But we remain very committed to the open source community.

Angie Chang: So the eng team sounds very collaborative. We’d like to dig into the culture a bit deeper. Are there any intentional or surprising steps Voxel51 has taken to create an inclusive and supportive environment for women? Or parts of the culture that you’re just really proud of?

Remy Schor: The biggest thing is we have this really remarkable COO, our executive team of course is awesome. Our COO Dave is particularly involved in just sort of the day-to-day operations of course, and he’s really committed to continuing to leverage whatever tools we need to up level communication up level, for example, our recruiting efforts with respect to women and non-binary folks, and you know, people who have been sort of historically repressed in some way.

I feel like we’re still figuring out, and I think there’s no solution, there’s no one right way to ensure that in organizations both inclusive and welcoming and comfortable for people. But I think a good start is that, we are committed to dedicating the resources to improving, right? We tap third party resources. We’ve brought in some programming that has helped us kind of shore up our internal communication a little bit and, and kind of work in a more collaborative capacity. Yeah, that’s just the beginning. With just 50 people, I really do feel like we’re just getting started.

Josh Leven: Yeah. I I just add one thing. Initiatives are great and important, but I think what it really comes down to is how it’s incorporated in the everyday. I think every time we’re like designing an interview process or running a meeting or whatever else we’re doing day to day, there’s a part of us that’s thinking like, how do we make sure we’re doing this in a way where yes, women feel comfortable, but also, you know, quieter people feel comfortable. Or people whose English isn’t their first language feel comfortable, right? Like inclusivity isn’t, like, initiatives are helpful, but what it really comes down to is are you like being thoughtful in the day-to-day things that you’re doing?

Angie Chang: This question about, how does Voxel51 one’s mission to bring transparency and clarity to the world’s data influence your daily operations and decision making?

Josh Leven: Does it honestly influence our day-to-day operations and decision-making? I think it’s a fair question. Like, is that a day-to-day question? When I, when I think about a mission statement like that, I think it’s right at the core of the more strategic stuff that we do when we’re talking about like of the different things that we can do in 2025 to take the company to the next level, right? Like there we talked about all sorts of different opportunities of like different things we could build and different types of customers we could go after. And, you know, considering those options, bringing clarity to the world’s data is a helpful thing to help us decide between when we’re making big decisions.

Angie Chang: What tools and platforms does Voxel51 utilize to facilitate communication and project management?

Lanny Zhang: So we use Jira a lot. All the status are in sync through Jira and there has been some Confluence articles, there are lots of video records in our Google Drive. Also the Slack channel. If there is certain domain I haven’t touched for a long time and I need something, I usually just start through the Slack. Usually other people have already brought it up. Yeah, I would like to think myself as part of the more quiet side and there hasn’t been any like problem, I feel communicating or being able to communicate what I think of very honestly, like, feel very safe environment to work in.

Angie Chang: For the Principal Engineer role that you have open, how does this role contribute to the development and scaling of your enterprise solutions, especially processing large scale visual AI data sets?

Josh Leven: Wow, I … that’s so specific. I hope that was taken right outta the job description. ’cause you really understand the role. The role is targeted for one of the two squads that is most focusing on performance and reliability this year. One of the challenges that the company is tackling in 2025 is that the size of data sets that our customers are using is really starting to explode. Where we would talk about like a hundred thousand samples in the data sets or maybe 500,000. Now we’re talking to companies who have 50 million samples in the dataset where they’ll have a data lake with a billion samples in it.

The challenge that that squad is tackling this year is how do we bring all of the power of 51 to data, which is now several orders of magnitude more than the code was originally intended to handle. The challenges there are everything from infrastructure to backend to front end, because even when you figure everything out, there’s still an enormous amount of data that you wanna show on the front end, and you can’t show it all at once.

VOXEL51 IS HIRING!

Please consider applying at the links above!

Got questions? You can email recruiter Remy (remy@voxel51.com) or connect with Remy on LinkedIn, and/or email VPE Josh (josh@voxel51.com) or connect with him on LinkedIn.

From an open source project to an enterprise product, Voxel51’s visual AI is used worldwide in academic research labs, startups, and Fortune 10 companies. The engineering team is growing!

GROUP Career Coaching & 1:1 Mentorship with Girl Geem X + WEST Partnership – Save 10% As An Individual Mentee, and Get Even Bigger Savings for Group Sponsorship!

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We’re thrilled to announce a new partnership between Girl Geek X and WEST, designed to supercharge the careers of women in tech with personalized 1:1 mentorship!

This is your chance to work directly with an experienced mentor in Engineering or Product, someone who’s been in your shoes, knows the ropes, and can guide you on everything from setting career goals to navigating challenges unique to women in tech. Whether you’re looking for advice on leveling up, tackling tricky team dynamics, or making a leap into leadership, we’ve got you covered.

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Call for Sponsors and Speakers for Girl Geek X ELEVATE Virtual Conference and Career Fair – March 6-7, 2025!

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This year’s ELEVATE virtual conferences will be bigger and better than ever! We’ve added:

  • More sponsorship tiers for deeper partnership with companies. We’ve been asked about how to be a PARTNER sponsor, so please check out our new tiers in addition to the standard PRESENTING and BASIC pricing.
  • New a la carte sponsorship activations for sponsors interested in unique brand recognition and engagement opportunities.
  • Virtual career fair with booths, networking tables, 1:1 speed networking, 1:1 meetings and 1:group meetings – so many fun ways to connect!
  • Mentorship lounge hosted by participating sponsoring companies and invited special mentors.
VIEW SPONSORSHIP PROSPECTUS FOR 2025

Girl Geek X brings together thousands of women technologists, innovators and tech leaders from around the world to share the latest in tech and leadership with fellow mid-and-senior level professional women.

Since our inaugural International Women’s Day virtual conference in 2018, dozens of leading brands have leveraged our virtual events to drive top-of-funnel candidate diversity and build more inclusive Engineering, Product, and other technical teams.

Our virtual conferences and career fairs are 100% FREE for attendees. Last year, over 7,000 women signed up to attend – tuning in from 42 countries around the world – to be inspired by speakers on the latest in tech trends and leadership.

Session content typically covers the following topics:

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VIEW CONFERENCE SPONSORSHIP PROSPECTUS FOR 2025

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Call for Proposals – Rolling Speaker Submissions for Girl Geek X virtual events in 2025!

We are currently seeking speaker proposals for virtual ELEVATE Conference & Career Fair!

Girl Geek X invites women technologists, innovators and tech leaders from around the world to apply to speak and share the latest in tech and leadership with fellow mid-and-senior level women in technology!

Work on a unique technical project or have interesting insights you’d love to share? We want to hear from you! Both first-time and experienced speakers are welcome to apply. 

Applications are accepted on a rolling basis, so there is no hard deadline to apply… but earlier is always better! You may resubmit or submit multiple proposals at any time.

If it has been more than 6 months since you’ve applied, we recommend resubmitting.

Submit your proposal for a talk here  to be considered and invited to speak.

Why speak?

  • Share the exciting technology you’re working on, products you’re building, and tough problems you’re solving.
  • Increase your visibility within your own organization and position yourself as a subject-matter expert.
  • Discuss what you’ve learned the hard way so that other women can more easily navigate their own careers β€” your talk will reach thousands of viewers!
  • Highlight issues unique to women in technology/leadership, and issues you’ve experienced or are passionate about.
  • Spotlight your company‘s product, services, and employer brand.
  • Connect with other great women leaders, peers and mentors.
  • Elevating other women is a fun and rewarding experience.

Topics we are excited to hear about:

  • Technical interviewing for leadership roles (director and up) and individual contributors (ICs) from staff and up
  • Mid-to-senior-career transitions – technical interview prep / restarting after a hiatus / switching fields mid-career
  • AI – AI for job search / AI for good / prompt engineering
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  • Future of work – emerging skills / emerging fields / trends & predictions
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  • How your company does X – code review / gen AI / DEI / dev productivity / architecture / etc. Tell us how you’re doing things differently, and share examples or insights other tech leaders can implement in their own orgs.
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What are previous Girl Geek X sessions rated highly by attendees?

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Speaker Bio Template:

[name] is [job title] at [company]. In this role, she is responsible for [key activities]. Previously, she was [role] at [company] -OR- She has worked in this industry for [number of years]. She is passionate about [what motivates you]. She volunteers / leads [organizations and/or employee resource groups]. She studied [focus area] at [school].

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60 Female CTOs to Watch in 2025

New Faces Female CTOs to Watch Chief Technology Officers

Many of the world’s biggest brands and companies are helmed by female CTOs you should know.

This year, we welcome some new faces in annual list of 60 inspiring Chief Technology Officers (CTOs) to watch in 2025 – that happen to be incredible women technologists and engineers:

1 – Allianz Technology Chief Technology Officer GΓΌlay StelzmΓΌllner

Gülay Stelzmüllner Allianz CTO

Gülay Stelzmüllner is Chief Technology Officer at Allianz in Germany. With more than 20 years of IT experience, she has led complex and global IT projects, simplifying and automating IT operations, and driving process improvement and innovation. Prior to Alliaz, she worked at Siemens for over 17 years. She earned her diploma in computer science at Munich University.

2 – American Airlines Chief Technology Officer Anchal Gupta

Anchal Gupta American Airlines CTO

Anchal Gupta is Chief Technology Officer at American Airlines in the United States. Prior to American Airlines, she led engineering teams at JP Morgan Chase, Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation, Barclays, and American Express, to name a few. She earned her degrees in management from Indian Institute of Technology, Calcutta.

3 – Autodesk Chief Technology Officer Raji Arasu

Autodesk CTO Raji Arasu

Raji Arasu is Chief Technology Officer at Autodesk in California. Autodesk is the leading software for architecture, design, construction, engineering, and manufacturing. Prior to Autodesk, she was Senior Vice President of Platform at Intuit, Chief Technology Officer at StubHub, and spent over a decade at eBay, where she began as a senior manager and worked her way up to Vice President of Technology. She earned her bachelor’s in engineering at Savitribai Phule Pune University.

4 – Back Market Chief Technology Officer Dawn Baker

Dawn Baker Back Market CTO

Dawn Baker is Chief Technology Officer at Back Market in France. Back Market is a global marketplace for premium refurbished electronics. Prior to Back Market, Dawn was a Senior Director of Engineering at Google, Vice President of Engineering at Fitbit, Senior Manager of Site Reliability Engineering at LinkedIn, and more. She earned her bachelor’s at Boston University.

5 – BMC Americas Chief Technology Officer Amanda Blevins

VMware CTO Amanda Blevins

Amanda Blevins is Chief Technology Officer at BMC Americas in Colorado. BMC helps customers run and reinvent businesses with open, scalable, and modular solutions to complex IT problems. Prior to BMC, she was at VMware, Principal Architect at IHS, Senior Consultant for Electronic Data Systems, Technical Lead for ITD Server Solutions at Johns Manville, Network Engineer at DCS, Senior Network Administrator at FrontRange Solutions, and she began her early career as Network Administrator, Lab Administrator, and Helpdesk Technician. She earned her bachelor’s degree in Computer Science at American Sentinel University.

6 – Boundless Chief Technology Officer Emily Castles

Boundless CTO Emily Castles

Emily Castles is Chief Technology Officer at Boundless in Ireland. Boundless is an employment platform for compliance and human resources. Prior to starting Boundless, she was head of engineering at Bizimply. She has worked as a software engineer at Red Hills Software, Grontmij, and RPS Consulting Engineers. She earned both her bachelor’s and master’s degrees at University College Dublin.

7 – Cabot Chief Technology Officer Patricia Hubbard

Patricia Hubbard is Chief Technology Officer at Cabot in Massachusetts. Cabot is a leading global specialty chemical and performance materials company. Before Cabot, she was Vice President of R&D at Avery Dennison, Vice President of Corporate Technology at Avient (formerly PolyOne), and CVD Technology Manager at GE, where she worked for over a decade. She earned her Ph.D. in Polymer Science at The University of Akron and her bachelor’s degree in Chemistry at Case Western Reserve University.

8 – Canvas Chief Technology Officer Maria Telleria

Maria Telleria Canvas

Maria Telleria is Chief Technology Officer at Canvas in California. Canvas is the first robotic drywall finishing company. Before co-founding Canvas, Maria was a company lead at Otherlab. She is the lead author on eight patents and five patent applications related to Canvas systems and is a co-inventor on an additional three patents related to pneumatic robots. Maria earned her a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from MIT.

9 – Cardinal Health Chief Technology Officer Urvi Randhar

Urvi Randhar Cardinal Health

Urvi Randhar is Chief Technology Officer at Cardinal Health in Texas. Prior to Cardinal Health, she worked at Prime Therapeutics, Healogics, and Medsolis. Prior to that, she was at MEDHOST for 19 years, most recently as a Vice President of product development, where she worked her way up from senior software architect. She earned her bachelor’s in computer software engineering at SGSITS.

10 – Ethena Chief Technology Officer Anne Solmssen

Anne Solmssen Ethena

Anne Solmssen is Chief Technology Officer at Ethena in New York. Ethena is a compliance training platform. Prior to Ethena, she worked as a Tech Lead at Mark43 and interned at Palantir. She earned her bachelor’s in computer science at Harvard University.

11 – Etsy Chief Technology Officer Rachana Kumar

Etsy CTO Rachana Kumar

Rachana Kumar is Chief Technology Officer at Etsy in New York. Etsy is a global marketplace for unique and creative goods. She was promoted from Vice President of Engineering, and has been at Etsy for a decade, when she joined as an Engineering Manager. Prior to Etsy, she co-founded ShaadiKarma, was a Graduate Consultant at Columbia University, interned at United Nations Population Fund, worked as Lead Software Architect at Brighter India Foundation, managed Web Development at BET Networks, consulted at Ernst & Young, and began her career as a Programmer Analyst at Cognizant. She earned her bachelor’s degree in Electronics and Communication at RV College of Engineering and a master’s degree in Public Administration at Columbia University.

12 – ezCater Chief Technology Officer Erin DeCesare

Erin DeCesare EZCater

Erin DeCesare is Chief Technology Officer at ezCater in Massachusetts. ezCater is the leading marketplace for corporate catering. Prior to ezCater, she was Vice President of Data and Analytics at Bottomline Technologies, Vice President of Data and Analytics at Vistaprint, Director of Program Management at Fidelity Investments, Project Manager at Sovereign Bank, Project Manager at Woodman Design Group, and began her career as an Information Technology Account Manager at Signature. She earned her bachelor’s degree in Biology at Boston University and her MBA at Northeastern University.

13 – Financial Times Chief Technology Officer Rebecca Salsbury

Rebecca Salsbury Financial Times CTO

Rebecca Salsbury is Chief Technology Officer at Financial Times in the United Kingdom. Prior to the Financial Times, she worked at the BBC for 11 years, most recently as Deputy Director of the BBC Platform overseeing platforms and digital products. She earned her bachelor’s and master’s in mathematics at University of Maine. 

14 – Getlabs Chief Technology Officer Claire Hough

Claire Hough is Chief Technology Officer at Getlabs in California. Prior to Getlabs, she was Chief Technology Officer at Carbon Health, a tech-enabled healthcare company providing primary and urgent care. Prior to Carbon Health, she was Chief Technology Officer at Lyte, Vice President of Engineering at ApolloQL, Senior Vice President of Engineering at Udemy, Senior Vice President of Engineering at Nextag, Senior Vice President of Engineering at Napster, and Vice President at Netscape. She earned her bachelor’s degree in Engineering and master’s degree in Operations Research, both at UC Berkeley.

15 – Ghost Foundation Chief Technology Officer Hannah Wolfe

Hannah Wolfe is Chief Technology Officer at Ghost Foundation in England. Ghost is an open source publishing platform for new-media creators to share and grow a business around their content. Before co-founding Ghost Foundation, she worked as a Senior Developer at Moo.com and began her career as an Interactive Developer at Engine Creative. She earned her bachelor’s degree in Computer Science at University of Nottingham, and her MBA at Nottingham University Business School.

16 – Halma Chief Technology Officer Catherine Michel

Halma CTO Catherine Michel

Catherine Michel is Chief Technology Officer at Halma in England. Halma (LON:HLMA) is a global group of life-saving technology companies, from safety to environmental and medical. Before joining Halma, she was Chief Technology Officer at Sigma Systems, Trustee at Skylarks Charity, Founder and Chief Technology Officer at Tribold for a decade. She began her career at Accenture as a Senior Manager. She earned her bachelor’s in Finance at University of Michigan – Stephen M. Ross School of Business.

17 – Hanwha Chief Technology Officer Danielle Merfeld

Danielle Merfeld is Chief Technology Officer at Hanwha Group in North Carolina. Hanwha is the 7th largest business group in South Korea leading a business portfolio covering energy, ocean, aerospace, finance, and more. Prior to GE Renewable Energy, she was Vice President and General Manager at GE, Solar Business Leader at GE Energy, Solar Platform Leader at GE for over a decade, and began her career as a Wide Bandgap Semiconductor Researcher at GE. She earned her Ph.D. in Electrical and Electronics Engineering at Northwestern University and her bachelor’s degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering at University of Notre Dame.

18 – Heroku Chief Technology Officer Gail Frederick

Gail Frederick

Gail Frederick is Chief Technology Officer at Heroku in Oregon. Prior to joining Heroku at Salesforce, Gail worked at eBay, most recently as Vice President of mobile and ecosystem. She earned her certificate for management at MIT Sloan, her master’s in computer science at University of Washington, and her bachelor’s in computer science at University of Michigan.

19 – Honeycomb Chief Technology Officer Charity Majors

Charity Majors is Chief Technology Officer at Honeycomb.io in California. Honeycomb provides full-stack observability designed for high cardinality data and collaborative problem solving for engineers to understand and debug production software. Prior to co-founding Honeycomb, she was a Production Engineering Manager at Facebook, Infrastructure Tech Lead at Parse for a year, Cloud Systems Engineer at Cloudmark, Systems Engineer at Shopkick for a year, and began her career as a Systems Engineer and Systems Engineering Manager at Linden Lab. She attended University of Idaho. She has published books on database reliability engineering and observability engineering.

20 – Honeywell Chief Digital Technology Officer Sheila Jordan

Sheila Jordan Honeywell

Sheila Jordan is Chief Digital Technology Officer at Honeywell in North Virginia. Honeywell helps organizations solve complex global challenges in automation, aviation, and energy. Prior to Honeywell, Sheila led IT at Symantec, Cisco, and Grand Circle. Prior to that, she worked at Walt Disney World for 14 years, most recently as Senior Vice President. She earned her MBA at Florida Institute of Technology and her bachelor’s in accounting at University of Central Florida.

21 – HPE Federal Systems Chief Technology Officer Tracy Mills

Tracy Mills HPE Federal CTO

Tracy Mills is Chief Technology Officer of Federal Systems at Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) in Hawaii. HPE strives to be the strategic partner for Department of Defense organizations of all sizes. Prior to HPE, she worked at PACXA for 7 years. She earned her degrees from University of Maryland in international relations and communications.

22 – Intrado Chief Technology Officer Liz Nguyen

Liz Nguyen Intrado CTO

Liz Nguyen is Chief Technology Officer of Intrado in Colorado. Intrado provides public safety agencies with data to coordinate emergency responses. Prior to Intrado, she was Chief Technology Officer at Vertafone, Senior Vice President at P2 Energy Solutions, and a Senior Director at Ventyx. She earned her bachelor’s at University of Chicago.

23 – JLL Chief Technology Officer Yao Morin

Yao Morin JLL CTO

Yao Morin is Chief Technology Officer at JLL in California. JLL is a leading professional services firm that specializes in real estate and investment management. Prior to JLL, she worked at StubHub as Chief Data Officer and US Head of Engineering. Prior to StubHub, she worked at Intuit as Head of Data Science. She earned her PhD and master’s in electrical engineering at University of Minnesota, and her bachelor’s in information engineering at Beijing University.

24 – Johnson & Johnson Chief Technology Officer Rowena Yeo

Rowena Yeo is Chief Technology Officer at Johnson & Johnson in Singapore. Johnson & Johnson is the largest and most broadly based healthcare company in the world. Before joining Johnson & Johnson, she was Vice President and Chief Information Officer for Asia Pacific at Janssen Pharmaceutical, and Global Group Chief Information Officer at Cargill for over a decade, and her early career began as a Systems Engineer at IBM. She earned her bachelor’s degree in Engineering at National University of Singapore.

25 – Kapor Center Chief Technology Community Officer Lili Gangas

Lili Gangas Kapor Center CTO

Lili Gangas is Chief Technology Community Officer at Kapor Center in California. The Kapor Center is leveling the playing field and building a future where the tech industry makes a positive impact on culture, society and the economy. Prior to joining Kapor Center, she was Lead Associate at Booz Allen Hamilton, NYU Entrepreneurial Institute Programs MBA Intern for a year, and a Senior Multi-Disciplined Engineer at Raytheon. She earned her bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering at USC and her MBA at NYU Stern School of Business.

26 – Kennametal Chief Technology Officer Carlonda Reilly

Carlonda Reilly is Chief Technology Officer at Kennametal in Pennsylvania. Kennametal is a global industrial technology leader delivering productivity to customers through materials science, tooling and wear-resistant solutions. Before joining Kennametal, she was at DuPont for over two decades, most recently as Global Technology Director of Nylon, Polyester and Filaments. In her early carer, she joined DuPont as a Senior Research Engineer for Crop Protection and Central Research and Development. She earned her bachelor’s degree in Chemical Engineering at MIT, and an MS, Chemical Engineering and PhD, Chemical Engineering at University of Delaware.

27 – Klaviyo Chief Technology Officer Surabhi Gupta

Surabhi Gupta Klaviyo CTO

Surabhi Gupta is Chief Technology Officer at Klaviyo in Boston. Klaviyo powers smarter digital relationships. Prior to Klaviyo, she worked at Robinhood, most recently as Senior Vice President of Engineering. Prior to Robinhood, she worked at Airbnb, she was Director of Engineering. Prior to that, she was a Staff Software Engineer at Google, and conducted research at Microsoft as an intern. She earned her master’s in computer science at Stanford University and her bachelor’s in computer science at Stony Brook University.

28 – Kyndryl Chief Technology Officer Kristi Cunningham

Kristi Cunningham Kyndryl

Kristi Cunningham is Chief Technology Officer at Kyndryl in Florida. Kyndryl designs, builds, manages and modernizes mission-critical technology systems that the world depends on every day. Prior to Kyndryl, she worked at Accenture, where she was Managing Director, Global and North American Financial Services Lead. Prior to Accenture, she worked at Capital One for 23 years, most recently as VP of Enterprise Data Management. She earned her master’s in information technology at Virginia Tech and her bachelor’s in computer science at Jacksonville University.

29 – Leaf Chief Technology Officer Helga Alvarez

LEAF CTO Helga Alvarez

Helga Alvarez is Chief Technology Officer at Leaf in the United Kingdom. Leaf combines years of full-funnel marketing expertise with proprietary growth-engine technology to deliver revenue and sustainable growth for clients. Prior to joining Leaf, she was Co-Founder and Creative Technologist at Cometoide for a year, Software Developer at Possible Worldwide, Visiting Research Scientist at Korea Institute of Science and Technology, and Product Management and Marketing at FMWebschool. She earned her bachelor’s in Software Engineering at Universidad Latina de Costa Rica.

30 – LimeLoop Chief Technology Officer Chantal Emmanuel

Chantal Emmanuel is Chief Technology Officer at LimeLoop in New York. LimeLoop’s smart shipping platform combines reusable packaging and a simple sensor for a real-time lens into the e-commerce experience. Retailers have a powerful platform to effectively understand and communicate with their customers, while providing the insights necessary to inform ESG and supply chain decisions. Before co-founding LimeLoop, she was a Software Engineer at SYPartners, Lead Software Engineer at Red Clay, Community Program Officer at New York Cares, and began her early career in AmeriCorps VISTA. She earned her bachelor’s degree at Binghamton University and studied entrepreneurship at Cornell University.

31 – Linktree Chief Technology Officer Farnaz Azmoodeh

Farnaz Azmoodeh Linktree CTO

Farnaz Azmoodeh is Chief Technology Officer at Linktree in California. Linktree enables creators, brands, artists, publishers, agencies, and businesses of all sizes to curate a place where they can share, sell and grow.  Prior to Linktree, she worked at Snapchat as VP of Engineering. Prior to Snapchat , Farnaz worked at Google for almost a decade, more recently as an Engineering Manager. She began her career as a Software Engineer at Google. She earned her master’s in computer science at University of Southern California and her bachelor’s in computer science at Sharif University of Technology.

32 – Lyra Health Chief Technology Officer Jenny Gonsalves

Jenny Gonsalves is Chief Technology Officer at Lyra Health in California. Lyra Health is a leading provider of mental health benefits, transforming mental health care by creating a frictionless experience for members, providers, and employers. Before joining Lyra Health, she was Vice President of Engineering at SugarCRM for a decade, Senior Software Engineer at Epiphany, and began her early career as Programmer Analyst at RBC Dominion Securities. She earned her bachelor’s degree in Computer Science at University of Toronto.

33 – Manara Chief Technology Officer Laila Abudahi

Laila Abudahi is Chief Technology Officer and co-founder at Manara in California. Meaning β€œlighthouse” in Arabic, Manara is on a mission to untap the full human potential in MENA and diversify the global tech sector.  Before Manara, she was a Senior Software Engineer at NVIDIA. a Dataplane Software Engineer at Palo Alto Networks, and founded MOTION in Gaza to develop Kinect-based interactive educational solutions for kids. She earned her bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering at Al-Azhar University in Gaza, and her master’s degree in Electrical, Electronics, and Communications Engineering at University of Washington, where she was a Fulbright Scholar.

34 – MetaLab Chief Technology Officer Jona Moore

Jona Moore Metalab CTO

Jona Moore is Chief Technology Officer at MetaLab in Washington. MetaLab helps the world’s top companies design, ship, and build digital products. Prior to MetaLab, she worked at frog, most recently as Global Vice President of Technology and Product Design and Delivery. She earned her bachelor’s in computer science at British Columbia Institute of Technology.

35 – Microsoft Security Chief Technology Officer Michal Braverman-Blumenstyk

Microsoft Security CTO Michal Braverman Blumenstyk

Michal Braverman-Blumenstyk is Chief Technology Officer at Microsoft Security in Israel. Microsoft Security provides comprehensive security solutions. Prior to joining Microsoft a decade ago, she worked as General Manager at RSA (the security division of EMC), Chief Operating Officer at Cyota (acquired by RSA), and Vice President of Product Development at RadView. She earned her master’s in Computer Science at Columbia University.

36 – Murmuration Chief Technology Officer Heidi Williams

Heidi Williams Murmuration CTO

Heidi Williams is Chief Technology Officer at Murmuration in California. Murmuration amplifies the power of civic engagement with data, tools, and insights for organizations building healthier and more equitable communities. Prior to joining Murmuration, Heidi was Head of Engineering at Grammarly, Chief Technology Officer at teQuitable, Vice President of Platform Engineering at Box, and worked at Adobe Systems for over a decade. She earned her bachelor’s in computer science at Brown University and on the side, founded and organizes WEST D&I Mentorship Programs for women in tech.

37 – NASDAQ Chief Technology Officer Capital Access Platforms Angie Ruan

Angie Ruan NASDAQ CTO

Angie Ruan is Chief Technology Officer Capital Access Platforms at NASDAQ in New York. Nasdaq is a global technology company that champions inclusive growth and prosperity, creating opportunity for markets and economies of all sizes. Prior to NASDAQ, Angie was a technology executive at Chime, SVP Technology at NASDAQ, technology executive at American Express, head of engineering at PayPal, and more. She earned her master’s in computer science at UC Santa Barbara and her bachelor’s in computer science at Tsinghua University.

38 – Netflix Chief Technology Officer Elizabeth Stone

Elizabeth Stone Netflix CTO

Elizabeth Stone is Chief Technology Officer at Netflix in California. Netflix is a leading entertainment services for enjoying TV series, films and games across a wide variety of genres and languages. Prior to Netflix, she worked at Lyft as Vice President of Science. Prior to Lyft, she worked at Nuna as Chief Operating Officer. She earned her PhD in economics at Stanford University and her bachelor’s in economics at Masschusetts Institute of Technology.

39 – NovoEd Chief Technology Officer Farnaz Ronaghi

NovoEd CTO Farnaz Ronaghi

Farnaz Ronaghi is Chief Technology Officer at NovoEd in California. NovoEd provides a collaborative learning platform to empower organizations to design and deliver experiential learning. Before co-founding NovoEd over a decade ago, she was working on a PhD at Stanford University with a dissertation on collaborative learning at scale. The company spun out of Stanford University’s social algorithm laboratory in 2012. She earned her bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering at Sharif University of Technology and her master’s in Management Science and Engineering at Stanford University.

40 – Novolex Chief Technology Officer Adrianne Tipton

Adrianne Tipton Novolex CTO

Adrianne Tipton is Chief Technology Officer at Novolex in Texas. Novolex is a leader in packaging choice, innovation and sustainability. Prior to joining Novolex over a decade ago, she worked at Cenveo as Vice President of new product development, ORC International as Vice President of business, The Clorox Company as Sales R&D Liaison. She began her career as a key accounts manager and senior process engineer at Novellus Systems. She earned her PhD in synthetic bioorganic chemistry at University of Nevada, Reno and her bachelor’s in certified chemistry at Northern Arizona University

41 – One Concern Chief Technology Officer Nicole Hu

Nicole Hu One Concern CTO

Nicole Hu is Chief Technology Officer and co-founder at One Concern in California. One Concern is a Resilience-as-a-Service solution that brings disaster science together with machine learning for better decision making. Prior to One Concern, she worked as a Software Development Engineer on critical projects in the core platform team at Flipkart, the fastest growing e-commerce platform in India. Nicole earned her master’s in Computer Science from Stanford University.

42 – Palo Alto Networks IoT Security Chief Technology Officer May Wang

May Wang Palo Alto Netowrks Internet of Things Security CTO

May Wang is Chief Technology Officer Internet of Things Security at Palo Alto Networks in California. Prior to her current role at Palo Alto Networks, May co-founded an AI-powered IoT security company Zingbox, which was acquired by Palo Alto Networks in 2019. Before Zingbox, she was a Principal Architect in the Cisco CTO Office. May earned her Ph.D. in electrical engineering at Stanford University.

43 – Pfizer Chief Digital and Technology Officer Lidia Fonseca

Lidia Fonseca Pfizer CTO

Lidia Fonseca is Chief Digital and Technology Officer at Pfizer in New York. Pfizer pursues scientific breakthroughs that change patients’ lives with revolutionary medicines. Prior to Pfizer, she was Chief Information Office at both Quest and Labcorp, Executive Vice President at Synarc, and Vice President of Supply Chain Management and Nuclear Medicine at Philips. She earned her MBA at Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University, and her bachelor’s in history at University of California at Berkeley.

44 – Pleo Chief Technology Officer Meri Williams

Meri Williams is Chief Technology Officer at Pleo in England. Pleo offers smart company cards that enable employees to buy the things they need for work, all while keeping a company’s finance team in control of spending. Prior to Pleo, she was Chief Technology Officer at Healx, Chief Technology Officer at Monzo Bank, Chief Technology Officer at Moo.com, Chief Technology Officer at M&S.com, Chief Technology Officer and Founder at Balloon Studios, Head of Operations for North Europe Site Services at Procter & Gamble. She earned her bachelor’s degree in Computer Science at University of Bath.

45 – Praxis Labs Chief Technology Officer Theresa Vu

Praxis Labs CTO Theresa Vu

Theresa Vu is Chief Technology Officer at Praxis Labs in New York. Praxis Labs is making society more equitable by advancing workplace inclusion and belonging. Before joining Praxis Labs, she was Senior Vice President of Engineering at Xandr, where she worked for over decade – starting as a Senior C Developer. She began her early career as an Analyst at Yahoo! and Right Media. She earned her bachelor’s degree at UC Berkeley and her master’s degree in Computer Science at Brown University.

46 – Precisely Chief Technology Officer TendΓΌ YoğurtΓ§u

TendΓΌ YoğurtΓ§u is Chief Technology Officer at Precisely in Massachusetts. Precisely is a leader in data integrity, providing accuracy, consistency, and context in data. Prior to joining Precisely, she worked at Syncsort, most recently as Chief Technology Officer. She began her early career as an Adjunct Professor at Stevens Institute of Technology in the Computer Science Department. She earned her PhD in Computer Science at Stevens Institute of Technology, and both her master’s in Industrial Engineering, and her bachelor’s in Computer Engineering at BoğaziΓ§i University in Turkey.

47 – Redfin Chief Technology Officer Bridget Frey

Bridget Frey is Chief Technology Officer at Redfin in Washington. Redfin is the modern way to buy or sell a home. Redfin serves 100+ major metros in the U.S. and has saved customers more than $1B in commissions. Before joining Redfin, she was Director of Engineering at Lithium Technologies, Vice President of Development at IntrisiQ, Senior Program Manager at IMlogic, and began her early career as Software Engineering Manager at Plumtree. She earned her bachelor’s in Computer Science at Harvard University.

48 – SharkNinja Chief Technology Officer Dawn Fitzgerald

Dawn Fitzgerald SharkNinja CTO

Dawn Fitzgerald is Chief Technology Officer at SharkNinja in Massachusetts. SharkNinja is a global product design and technology company creating lifestyle solutions through innovative products for consumers. Prior to SharkNinja, she was Vice President of Engineering at American Family Insurance, Head of innovation, Platform and Analytics at Schneider Electric, Director of IT at Invensys, and Vice President of Engineering at Aurora Enterprises. She earned her MBA and master’s in engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and her bachelor’s in electrical and computer systems engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

49 – Slalom Chief Technology Officer Michelle Grover

Slalom CTO Michelle Grover

Michelle Grover is Chief Technology Officer at Slalom in California. Slalom is a global business and technology consulting company that is purpose-led. Before joining Slalom, she was Chief Information Officer at Twilio for a year, Consulting CTO at Softcom for a year, and Vice President of Research and Development at Tripit.

50 – Splunk Chief Technology Officer Min Wang

Min Wang Splunk CTO

Min Wang is Chief Technology Officer at Splunk in California. Splunk is a cybersecurity and observability leader. Prior to Splunk, she was a Director of Engineering at Google, Senior Vice President at Visa Research, Senior Staff Research Scientist at Google, and Distinguished Technologist at HPE. She earned her PhD in Computer Science from Duke University, and her master’s and bachelor’s degrees in Computer Science at Tsinghua University. She has published over 90 research papers and journals.

51 – Sterling Chief Technology Officer Ivneet Kaur

Ivneet Kaur is Chief Technology Officer at Sterling in Florida. Sterling is a leading provider of background and identity services with background and identity verification for trust and safety. Prior to joining Sterling, she was Chief Technology Officer at Silicon Valley Bank, Chief Technology Officer and Chief Information Officer at Equifax, Technology Leader at Equifax, Product Development Manager at Claritas, and she began her early career as Software Engineer at Microsoft. She earned her master’s degree in Engineering Management at University of Maryland.

52 – SurveyMonkey Chief Technology Officer Robin Ducot

Momentive CTO Robin Ducot

Robin Ducot is Chief Technology Officer at SurveyMonkey in California. SurveyMonkey provides enterprise solutions for agile experience management and insights. Before joining SurveyMonkey, she was Senior Vice President of Product Engineering at DocuSign, Vice President of Engineering at Eventbrite, Vice President of Web Development at Linden Lab, Vice President of Web, User Experience and Engineering Group at Adobe Systems, Vice President of Professional Services at Avolent, and began her early career as Senior Software Engineer at BGS Systems. She earned her bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and Art History at UMass Boston.

53 – Sweetgreen Chief Technology Officer Wouleta Ayele

Sweetgreen CTO Wouleta Ayele

Wouleta Ayele is Chief Technology Officer at Sweetgreen. Sweetgreen believes that real food should be convenient and accessible to everyone, making salads from scratch at scale. Before joining Sweetgreen, she was Senior Vice President of Technology at Starbucks, Senior Director of Information Systems and Business Intelligence at Attachmate, IT Leader of Corporate Technology at The Coca-Cola Company, Engineering Manager at Hyundai Motor America, and she began her early career as Enterprise Architect and Engineer at CIBA Vision. She earned her bachelor’s degree in Computer Science at Cumberland University and her master’s degree in International Finance at Mercer University.

54 – Textio Chief Technology Officer Tacita Morway

Textio CTO Tacita Morway

Tacita Morway is Chief Technology Officer at Textio in Massachusetts. Textio has developed the world’s most advanced workplace language guidance, so you can see where social bias is hidingβ€”and exactly how to fix it. Before joining Textio, she was Executive Vice President of Engineering and Product at ActBlue, Director of Engineering at Salsify, Vice President of Engineering and Product at Ditto Labs, Director of Technology at WGBH, Founder at Tacita Gardens, Founder at Tacita Designs, Software Engineer at Context Integration for a year, IT Consultant at Wellesley College Information Services for a year, and began her early career as an Apprentice Mechanic at Chicago Auto. She earned a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science at Wellesley College, and a bachelor’s degree in Painting and Drawing at School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

55 – Thoughtworks Chief Technology Officer Rachel Laycock

Rachel Laycock Thoughtworks CTO

Rachel Laycock is Chief Technology Officer at ThoughtWorks in Delaware. Thoughtworks is a global technology consultancy that integrates strategy, design and engineering to drive digital innovation. From a Girl Geek Dinner in London, Rachel was recruited to join Thoughtworks as a developer. She completed her executive education from Columbia Business School, and earned both her master’s in information technology and bachelor’s in media technology from Teesside University.

56 – Toast Chief Technology Officer Debra Chrapaty

Toast CTO Debra Chrapaty

Debra Chrapaty is Chief Technology Officer at Toast in Washington. Toast empowers restaurants of all sizes to build great teams, increase revenue, improve operations, and delight guests. Prior to Toast, she worked as Vice President and COO Alexa at Amazon, Chief Technology Officer at Wells Fargo, Chief Operating Officer at Declara, and Corporate Vice President at Microsoft. She earned her MBA at NYU Stern and her bachelor’s in economics at Temple University.

57 – Twitch Chief Technology Officer Christine Weber

Twitch CTO Christine Weber

Christine Weber is Chief Technology Officer at Twitch in Colorado. Twitch is where thousands of communities come together for whatever, every day. Prior to Twitch, she was Interim Chief Technology Officer at Liberty Latin America, Senior Vice President of OTT Engineering at Sling TV, and was at EchoStar for 18 years, most recently as Vice President of OTT Engineering. She began her early career as a Software Engineer. She earned her degree in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at University of Wyoming.

58 – United Way Chief Technology Officer Lawana Jones

Lawana Jones United Way CTO

Lawana Jones is Chief Technology Officer at United Way in Washington, D.C. United Way strengthens local resilience, advances health, youth opportunity, and financial security by mobilizing communities to action so all can thrive. Prior to joining United Way, Lawana was Chief Operating Officer for United Way of Greater Rochester and the Finger Lakes, Principal, Continuous Improvement Lead – IT, Transformation Office at L3Harris Technologies, and Project Director, Information Security Services at Xerox. Lawana earned her master’s in business at the University of Rochester and a bachelor’s in Business & Accounting from Nazareth College of Rochester.

59 – Verizon Connect Chief Product and Technology Officer Kinnera Angadi

Kinnera Angadi Verizon Connect CTO

Kinnera Angadi is Chief Product and Technology Officer at Verizon Connect in Pennsylvania. Verizon Connect is committed to help create a safer tomorrow by empowering our customers with the technology to use data-driven strategies to connect, coach, and champion safe driving behavior. Prior to joining Verizon Connect, she worked at Honeywell as Chief Technology Officer of Smart Energy, Comcast as Senior Director of Engineering, and Comcast as Senior Technical Project Manager. She earned her master’s in computer science at Kansas State University and bachelor’s in Information Technology at Osmania University.

60 – Wayfair Chief Technology Officer Fiona Tan

Fiona Tan Wayfair CTO

Fiona Tan is Chief Technology Officer at Wayfair in California. Wayfair is the destination for all things home: helping everyone, anywhere create their feeling of home. Prior to joining Wayfair, she worked at Walmart as the Head of Technology, Ariba as Vice President of Engineering, TIBCO as Vice President of Engineering, and Oracle as Senior Member of Technical Staff. She earned her master’s in computer science at Stanford University and her bachelor’s degree in computer science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The annual list is compiled by Angie Chang.

We love seeing where women’s careers take them over the years! Technical women leaders of large and small organizations have demonstrated different pathways to moving up. Sometimes they move up over a decade. Sometimes they are recruited and hired to the top.

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ELEVATE 2024 Career Fair Kickoff – Employer Intro – Voxel51 (Hiring for Engineering Manager – Remote)

Remy Schor (Recruiter at Voxel51), Lanny Wang (Software Engineer at Voxe51) and Josh Leven (VP of Engineering at Voxel51) speak about the company, hiring, open roles, and more.

A fully-remote Series B startup, Voxel51 is building a platform that empowers ML teams to create more accurate, less biased AI across a number of exciting fields, including healthcare, security, and self-driving cars.

VOXEL51 IS HIRING – REMOTE JOBS!

TRANSCRIPT

Remy Schor: Voxel51 is a 48-person Series B company. We are in growth mode currently. Essentially our tool allows computer-vision engineers to curate their visual datasets in relationship to the models they are building and refining. In 2024, we doubled our revenue and actually doubled our headcount as well. 

In 2025, we are looking to double revenue again and we’ll continue to grow responsibly, probably increasing our headcount by 50% – hopefully more… In terms of the responsible and diligent growth model that is really important to us, that  really focuses on not over-hiring and intentionally adding people to the team, so when I think about how we do that, I want to address inclusion and equity with respect to recruiting. 

I actually think hiring in general is a bit broken, and that’s not just a Voxel51 thing, I think that’s an industry-wide problem, maybe a world problem. If you are generally curious about how to stand out and be elevated in tech specifically, or with respect to your background, go ahead and watch the [resume] presentation that we just did – I think that will help you stand out.

How do I as a recruiter focus on inclusion at Voxel51 in spite of some of that noise and the distractions? And the reality is, I think it’s our commitment to the candidate experience and also to the employee experience, so both – as you get noticed and interviewed and hopefully hired, and also once you are an employee here. 

What we do really well: we are extremely flexible, and I think we do a really nice job of inclusively allowing people to live their lives. 

We ask a lot of ourselves, and we ask a lot of each others, it’s very heavy lifting as is true in most startups, but there is time and space for family and pets – I can’t believe my dogs haven’t barked in the last hour, but they are always around and constantly barking, and nobody at Voxel51 gets upset. 

That’s the sort of run down on my recruiting philosophy and a little bit about us, and I will pass it on to Josh…

Josh Leven: Awesome. Thank you Remy. Hi I’m Josh, VP of Engineering here at Voxel51. Some basics about engineering here – first of all, the company is fully remote. Execs on the east coast and the west coast. Everyone is in the US and Canadian time zones, but fully remote. We do a couple of retreats every year but otherwise you are [working] out of your home office. 

We currently have 17 engineers, and as Remy said, we are growing. We are hiring now and have plans to do hiring more next year. 

Our tech stack: Python and TypeScript. We are primarily an on-prem solution, we are not really a SaaS product, which brings with it its own engineering challenges. But I actually joined the company a few months ago and one of the biggest reasons for me is the huge impact our product has. 

We are all very aware – the AI revolution is coming – and what we are doing at Voxel51 enables the teams that are building AI models to build models that are less biased, more safe, more reliable, and helping them to get those models into production more consistently. 

We are helping a huge range of industries in doing that – we are working with companies in healthcare, autonomous vehicles, robotics, agriculture, retail, sports, and a bunch more. And even beyond that, we are not just doing that for big companies. 

We have a vibrant open source community. Everyone from college students and academic researchers, to professionals in machine learning, in addition to, of course, a growing enterprise community using our enterprise product, Another really unique thing about Voxel51 is that we are making big investments into innovation. 

Jason, one of our co-founders, is a research professor at the University of Michigan and he leads our MLE pure research teams. They are doing groundbreaking research that we then get to incorporate in our products, both open source and enterprise. 

This is one of the ways we continue to be a part of the conversation and the cutting edge of artificial intelligence. But on top of that, we want everyone at  the company to have the opportunity to keep up with that conversation, so amongst a number of other things, every other Tuesday we have an ML paper review where an expert in the field will come and walk us through one of the papers they think is really interesting and valuable. 

Alright. So I’d love to also tell you about our culture but better than me, I want to hand it off to Lanny, one of our engineers, to talk about what it’s like working at Voxel51. In fact, she’s one of the engineers on the team that works most closely with the machine learning team.

Lanny Wang: Hi, ELEVATE! My name is Lanny. I’ve worked at Voxel51 for roughly two years, so working primarily on right now the ML workflow panels, so it relates to Python side, and on the frontend with React. 

Working at Voxel51, on a daily basis, we work as human beings, even though we write code. I feel all of my coworkers at Voxel51 are very kind and respectful people. The engineers have all kinds of different backgrounds. For instance, our devops – fun fact – used to work for a circus and went to acting school twenty years ago. We truly have backgrounds from everywhere, and people are very passionate about what we do, we are very helpful, and it’s always very pleasant to work with them. 

What I enjoy the most about working at Voxel51 is having a good balance of trust, the autonomy and the flexibility to determine what I want to do, and also, when I need something from people, everyone is always approachable and reachable. 

We also have weekly syncs where we get to discuss the newest trends in tech, so while we are remote, there are ways to keep up to trend with what we talk about. We have an annual retreat where we gather in teams, discuss bigger topics and ideas together down the road. 

With engineering, things are growing so rapidly, there are a lot of opportunities to continue to optimize and improve. I feel there are definitely lots of exciting opportunities and features to work on, especially that tie to the new AI trend. 

What I enjoy most is the really tie to customers. As an engineer, I not only care about the code, personally, I care about the future I deliver to, I want to see how it impacts people, do they use it, do they like it.. there’s a way we engage with customers, usually at a conference. Usually engineers can pick one academic conference to go to each year and have face-to-face communication with our customers, it could be students and people from academic, or clients from all the industries, talk to people in agriculture, in food, in retail, not to mention autonomous driving, etc. So being able to have that first-hand feedback not only from sales, but having engagement with customer, that makes me feel very great.

VOXEL51 IS HIRING – REMOTE JOBS!

Best of ELEVATE: Beyond Cracking the Coding Interview, Finding Your Place at Work, Mentorship, Crafting Your Resume, Courage – and Career Acceleration!

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On December 4-5, 2024, Girl Geek X founders Angie Chang and Sukrutha Bhadouria hosted over 1k women & allies globally, with 79% attendees interested in hearing about jobs, and 30+ speakers, and 2 employers actively recruiting! Help a girl geek land her next job in tech!

Here are the top 10 most engaging sessions from ELEVATE 2024 Conference & Career Fair:

mentorship savings girl geek x west coupon discount code#1 – Beyond Cracking the Coding Interview: Opening the Door to OpportunitiesGayle Laakmann McDowell, Author of Cracking the * Interview series

#2 – Crafting Your Resume as a Signal Thru the NoiseRemy Schor, Recruiter at Voxel51

#3 – How To Sell YourselfMaria Kitaigora, Senior Enterprise Account Manager at AWS

#4 – Bloom and Thrive: Where Do You Want to Grow (Big Tech vs. Startups vs. Entrepreneurship) Janet Lee, Product Marketer at Meta & Coach at EmbraceNow

#5 – Fireside Chat: Mentorship, Goals, and Career Acceleration with WESTHeidi Williams, Founder at WEST D&I Mentorship & Chief Technology Officer at Murmuration

#6 – Courage as a Carry On: An All Inclusive Itinerary to Launching You, Leveled UpLilah Jones, Director of Key Accounts at Google & Coach at LilahJones.com

#7 – Making Pivots in Your CareerDr. Julie Huang, Staff Scientist at Alector

#8 – Cracking the System Design InterviewSukrutha Bhadouria, Director of Engineering at Salesforce & CTO at Girl Geek X

#9 – Voxel51 Employer IntroRemy Schor, Recruiter at Voxel51, Josh Leven, VP of Engineering at Voxel51, Lanny Wang, Software Engineer at Voxel51

#10 – Financial Stability 101Kristina Robinson, Senior Engineering Manager

Thank You To ELEVATE 2024 Supporters – They Are Hiring!

Special thank you to our supporters at Voxel51 and 18C for recruiting from the Girl Geek X community of mid-to-senior level technical women. We can’t wait to help another girl geek get her next job in tech.

Don’t forget to check out featured jobs from Voxel51 and 18C.

The conference theme is β€œLift As You Climb.”

Speakers from Airbnb, AWS, Meta, Google, Upwork, Salesforce, Adobe, Microsoft, Workday, Walmart and more startups, spoke and answered questions, sharing career advice with attendees during their sessions, often welcoming connections on Linkedin.

If your company is looking to recruit more women this year, please don’t let them miss out on our next ELEVATE Virtual Conference & Career Fair sponsorship opportunity in March 2025 celebrating International Women’s Day!

In addition to virtual events, we partner with companies monthly on Girl Geek Dinners in the San Francisco Bay Area, booking now for 2025 dates.

Please email sponsors@girlgeek.io and we’ll be in touch.

Thank you in advance!

Angie Chang, Sukrutha Bhadouria, Amy Weicker, Amanda Beaty and the team at Girl Geek X
 
Girl Geek X ELEVATE Virtual Conference Sponsorship Prospectus

Link: Girl Geek X ELEVATE Virtual Conference Sponsorship Prospectus

Girl Geek X Dinners Sponsorship Prospectus

Link: Girl Geek X Dinners Sponsorship Prospectus

OUR PARTNERS ARE ACTIVELY HIRING!

Check out these featured career opportunities from our mission-aligned partners, and visit our open jobs page to view even more opportunities!

Feel free to list β€œGirl Geek X” as your referral. Forward this to a friend β€” Help a fellow girl geek land her next job in tech!

Girl Geek Elevate Voxel

QUOTABLE QUOTES FROM INSPIRING WOMEN IN TECH:

Gayle Laakmann McDowell ELEVATE Dec quote ()

Remy Schor ELEVATE Dec quote

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Lilah Jones ELEVATE Dec quote

Julie Huang ELEVATE Dec quote

Sukrutha Bhadouria ELEVATE Dec quote

Kristina Robinson ELEVATE Dec quote

Karishma Bhatnagar ELEVATE Dec quote ()

Bella Davis Riemer ELEVATE Dec quote

Emma Catlin ELEVATE Dec quote

Maryem Nasri ELEVATE Dec quote

Nandita Singh ELEVATE Dec quote

Rupal Haribhakti ELEVATE Dec quote ()
Gloria Wang ELEVATE Dec quote

Farhana Mustafa ELEVATE Dec quote ()

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Call for Speakers at Girl Geek X ELEVATE Virtual Conference and Career Fair – March 6-7, 2025!

What is ELEVATE?

Every year, Girl Geek X brings together thousands of women technologists, innovators and tech leaders from around the world to share the latest in tech and leadership with fellow mid-and-senior level professional women, non-binary folks, and our allies.

Since our inaugural International Women’s Day virtual conference in 2018, dozens of leading brands have leveraged our virtual events to drive top-of-funnel candidate diversity and build more inclusive Engineering, Product, and other technical teams.

Our ELEVATE virtual conferences and career fairs are 100% FREE for attendees. Last year, over 7,000 women signed up to attend – tuning in from 42 countries around the world – to be inspired by speakers on the latest in tech trends, professional development and leadership.

Session content typically covers the following topics:

  • Lightning Talks – Dive deep into an area that’s unique / critical to your business or role, from engineer to product, sharing strategy or insights.
  • Technical Skills & Tactics β€“ Tutorials, walkthroughs, or deep dives into a skillset (e.g. technical interviewing), product, or tactical approach to how you solved a real-world challenge.
  • Learning & Development – Topics include negotiation, mid-career job searches, interviewing tips, managing up, self-awareness, ageism / return to work bias, mental health, etc.

Apply to Speak!

We are currently seeking speaker proposals for virtual ELEVATE Conference & Career Fair!

Girl Geek X invites women technologists, innovators and tech leaders from around the world to apply to speak and share the latest in tech and leadership with fellow mid-and-senior level women in technology!

Work on a unique technical project or have interesting insights you’d love to share? We want to hear from you! Both first-time and experienced speakers are welcome to apply. 

Applications are accepted on a rolling basis, so there is no hard deadline to apply… but earlier is always better! The agenda is usually pretty well filled 2+ months prior to the event date.

You may resubmit or submit multiple proposals at any time.

If submitting a panel or fireside chat, please include additional speakers’ names, titles, and companies somewhere in your application.

If it has been more than 6 months since you’ve applied, we recommend resubmitting.

Submit your proposal for a talk here  to be considered and invited to speak.

Why speak?

  • Share the exciting technology you’re working on, products you’re building, and tough problems you’re solving.
  • Increase your visibility within your own organization and position yourself as a subject-matter expert.
  • Discuss what you’ve learned the hard way so that other women can more easily navigate their own careers β€” your talk will reach thousands of viewers!
  • Highlight issues unique to women in technology/leadership, and issues you’ve experienced or are passionate about.
  • Spotlight your company‘s product, services, and employer brand.
  • Connect with other great women leaders, peers and mentors.
  • Elevating other women is a fun and rewarding experience!

Topics our community is excited about:

  • How your company does X – code review / gen AI / DEI / dev productivity / architecture / etc. Tell us how you’re doing things differently, and share examples or insights other tech leaders can implement in their own orgs.
  • Technical interviewing for leadership roles (director and up) and individual contributors (ICs) from staff and up
  • Mid-to-senior-career transitions – technical interview prep / restarting after a hiatus / switching fields mid-career
  • AI – AI for job search / AI for good / prompt engineering / how to improve your AI skills
  • Infosec – cybersecurity
  • Data – how to implement a data strategy / data trends
  • Future of work – emerging skills / emerging fields / trends & predictions
  • Supply chain – logistics / AI / autonomous transport
  • Health & Environment – combating climate change / trending health issues / healthtech
  • Preventing Bias – algorithmic, hiring / retention / promotion / dealing with ageism
  • Conflict management – navigating hierarchy / office politics / people / transcending differences
  • Personal development – courage / vulnerability / identifying & preventing burnout
  • Networking – networking skills + tips / maintaining connections long-term / getting a referral without a network
  • Negotiation – pay / severance / understanding options and equity
  • Finance – investing / real estate / fintech / crypto
  • DEI – working in DEI roles / building inclusive teams / fostering a psychologically safe culture
  • Pride – transitioning at work / making LGBTQIA+ folks feel welcome + considered / building inclusive teams / leveraging allyship
  • What you’re most passionate about! – tell us wha gets you fired up, and let’s geek out together!
  • Submit your talk proposal here!

Need inspo? Here are some previous sessions attendees loved!

How to write a speaker submission, from our friends at Autodesk:

Sample Speaker Bio Template:

[name] is [job title] at [company]. In this role, she is responsible for [key activities]. Previously, she was [role] at [company] -OR- She has worked in this industry for [number of years]. She is passionate about [what motivates you]. She volunteers / leads [organizations and/or employee resource groups]. She studied [focus area] at [school].

Talk Title / Abstract Tips:

There are three parts to writing a talk title and abstract. Structure your thoughts around them to tell a short and complete story.

  1. Talk Title – Keep it simple and straightforward. Use terms that others might use to search for it.
  2. Problem Statement – Explain briefly the challenge you will help others address and the different perspective or experience that you can share with them.
  3. Benefits / Takeaways – Tell others clearly how they will benefit by spending time with you (e.g. the insights or skills they will learn). This can be a simple list of takeaways for conference attendees.

Still not sure what to talk about?

Check out our 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, and 2018 conference websites. You can find a bunch of videos at the Girl Geek X YouTube channel from past virtual events and our Bay Area Girl Geek Dinners.

Interested in partnering with Girl Geek X?

Promote your brand, products, employer brand, or open roles to our community of 40,000+ mid-to-senior women in tech!

For those with offices in the San Francisco Bay Area, consider hosting a Girl Geek Dinner. Your teams selects your speakers and sets the menu, and we’ll fill your space with women from the Girl Geek community who are excited to learn more about your company and your open roles.

Thank you for supporting our initiative to elevate women in tech and build a safe, supportive community where women & allies can connect to learn, share and grow in their careers!

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Best of ELEVATE 2024: Successful Leadership & Followership, GenAI for Job Search & Career Growth, Mid-Career Transitions & Burnout Recovery

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September 4, 2024 – Girl Geek X: ELEVATE Conference and Career Fair for mid-to-senior women in tech hosted over a thousand women & allies globally, with 89% attendees interested in hearing about jobs, over two dozen speakers, 2 resume workshops & recruiting at virtual 18C Booth. Help a girl geek land her next job in tech!

Here are the most-watched 15 sessions from ELEVATE 2024 Conference & Career Fair! Videos are publicly shared to Girl Geek X’s YouTube channel – see our Fall playlist:

  1. From Developer to CTO – Leadership Lessons to Accelerate Your Career – Rachel Laycock (Thoughtworks Chief Technology Officer)
  2. Harnessing the Power of Generative AI for Career Growth and Innovation – Jayeeta Putatunda (Fitch Ratings Senior Data Scientist, Emerging Technology)
  3. Traits of a Successful and Effective Leader – Haibei “Happy” Wang (AuditBoard Chief Technology Officer)
  4. Resume Review for Mid-To-Senior Women in Tech – Tal Flanchraych (ApplyAll Chief Executive Officer & Founder)
  5. From Chaos to Clarity: Building My Ultimate Productivity Framework – Thamara Andrade (Cadence Principal Software Engineer)
  6. Influencing as an Individual Contributor – Roojuta Lalani (Slack Staff Backend Software Engineer)
  7. Leveraging AI Tech for Effective Job Search – Nirmayee “Nemo” Dighe (Delaware Life Senior Analyst, Data & Strategy)
  8. Navigating the Career Lattice: Building Your Path to Success Florence RenΓ© (State Farm IT Product Owner)
  9. Career Fair Kickoff – 18C Intro – Danielle McLaughlin (18C Chief Executive Officer & Founder)
  10. Self-Confidence in the Face of Failure – Magda Miu (Adobe Senior Engineering Manager)
  11. Building Bridges: How Data Engineering Powers Up Analytics at Scale – Sreyashi Das (Netflix Senior Data Engineer)
  12. So You Want To Be a Leader BUT Are You a Good Follower? – Kenya Simmons (Gilead Sciences Senior Manager, IT Project Mgmt)
  13. Resume Review for Early Career Women in Tech – JenΓ©e Smith (Microsoft Software Engineer)
  14. Mid-Career Transitions: From Program Manager to Product in Trust and Safety – Ruby Yuen (Career Coach)
  15. From Balance to Burnoutt: Prioritizing Mental Health in the Workplace – Bhavana Ramachandra (Yelp Staff Machine Learning Engineer) 

About Our Partner: 18C is a boutique engineering search firm specializing in connecting exceptional technical women leaders with transformational opportunities. By blending strategic executive recruitment with passionate advocacy, we’re creating more equitable environments at the top companies in tech. Watch 18C’s Intro for insights on product, teams, hiring process, open remote & hybrid jobs!

18C IS HIRING – REMOTE, NYC & SF!

Check out open jobs at 18C!

If your company is looking to recruit more women this year, please don’t let them miss out on our nextΒ ELEVATE VirtualΒ Conference & Career Fair sponsorship opportunityΒ on December 4, 2024.

We also partner monthly with companies on Girl Geek DinnersΒ in the greater San Francisco Bay Area, booking now for 2024 and 2025. Please email usΒ sponsors@girlgeek.ioΒ and we’ll be in touch!

Thank you in advance,

Angie Chang, Sukrutha Bhadouria, andΒ the
team at Girl Geek XΒ 

OUR PARTNERS ARE ACTIVELY HIRING!

Check out these featured career opportunities from our mission-aligned partners, and visit our open jobs page to view even more opportunities!

Feel free to list β€œGirl Geek X” as your referral. Forward this to a friend β€” Help a fellow girl geek land her next job in tech!

Rachel Laycock ELEVATE Sep quote
Roojuta Lalani ELEVATE Sep quote
Kenya Simmons ELEVATE Sep quote
Thamara Andrade ELEVATE Sep quote
Sreyashi Das ELEVATE Sep quote
Jayeeta Putatunda ELEVATE Sep quote
Gaganjot Kaur Kang ELEVATE Sep quote
Michelle Ng ELEVATE Sep quote
Nirmayee Dighe ELEVATE Sep quote
Tal Flanchraych ELEVATE Sep quote
Cindy Lin ELEVATE Sep quote
Danielle McLaughlin ELEVATE Sep quote

Haibei Wang ELEVATE Sep quote
Ria Bhatia ELEVATE Sep quote
Swarnika Tiwari ELEVATE Sep quote
Florence Rene ELEVATE Sep quote
Janelle Leuthaeuser ELEVATE Sep quote
Ruby Yuen ELEVATE Sep quote
Viraj Gandhi ELEVATE Sep quote
Magda Miu ELEVATE Sep quote
Brittany Perlin Danishevsky ELEVATE Sep quote
Stella Li ELEVATE Sep quote
Jenee Smith ELEVATE Sep quote
Sunnita Blount ELEVATE Sep quote
Bhavana Ramachandra ELEVATE Sep quote
Sabrina Koumoin ELEVATE Sep quote

Volunteers wanted for Oakland public school students – SIGN UP to volunteer with us!

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Since the pandemic, Girl Geek X community volunteers have served the public school educators and students in East Oakland.

Our goal began with supporting students at our “adopted” school Coliseum College Prep Academy in Oakland, California teaching grades 6-12 with a computer science pathway. We providing access to volunteers and role models from the professional community for students in partnership with the nonprofit Oakland Education Fund, which coordinates volunteer activities with public schools in Oakland and clears volunteers for entry into the schools.

CCPA has the highest college-going rate in the district despite being located in one of Oakland’s highest poverty neighborhoods. 

Last year, we kicked off volunteering in August with Back-To-School Campus Prepsupporting Back-To-School prep with CCPA teachers on Friday, August 4, 2023 (1pm-4pm) in East Oakland!

oakland school volunteers back to school august ccpa classroom

Girl Geek X Community volunteers helped teachers with classroom projects to prepare their rooms and hallways for students return to campus for the new school year. More photos are on Facebook here. ❀️

LATINE/X READ-IN AT THORNHILL ELEMENTARY IN OAKLAND

The nonprofit Oakland Education Fund expanded access to students in Oakland elementary schools, starting with volunteering with Latine/x Read-in (Monday, October 2, 2023, 1pm – 2:30pm). Volunteers read books by Latine/x and Hispanic authors to students at Thornhill Elementary.

Girl Geek X volunteers at Latine/x Read-In (pictured from left: Thornhill Elementary School Librarian Marie Fox, Girl Geek X Founder Angie Chang, Customer Success Leader Haana Rafiq, Playground Global Principal People Operations Sylvia Donohoe, Technical Operations Leader Belisa Mandarano, Flexport Software Engineers Bryanna Valdivia and Rachel Colby, and Syntiant Director of HR Jenny Garcia).

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Volunteers read aloud books to 2-3 elementary school classes that celebrate Latine/x culture in the 90-minute volunteer shift. Books and sample questions to guide conversations were provided by the Oakland Education Fund. More photos are on Facebook here. ❀️

FIRST-GEN COLLEGE & CAREER PANEL AT CCPA IN OAKLAND

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The Girl Geek X CCPA career panel (Wednesday, October 4, 2pm-4pm), moderated by Vanessa Magaña with An Nguyen, Molly Dubow, Bryanna Valdivia, and Elizabeth Orpina shared advice from first-generation students now working in the technology industry. Read about the takeaways from the panel. ❀️

HELPING STUDENTS WITH CSU AND UC APPLICATIONS IN OAKLAND NOVEMBER 3 AND / OR NOVEMBER 17

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Volunteers supported seniors’s college applications, providing crucial feedback on grammar, flow, and clarity of writing during “College Crunch Days” – these are dedicated school days for high school seniors to work on their UC admissions applications.

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Note: a writing/comms background is NOT required to participate! Any experience writing in an academic/professional setting will be sufficient to participate in this event.

Volunteer shifts are 8:30am-12:30pm on Friday, November 3, 2023 and/or Friday, November 17, 2023 at CCPA’s College & Career Day office. More photos are on Facebook here.


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Join the launch of the virtual mentorship program at CCPA with TechLink to connect volunteers with students this spring!

How to volunteer virtually with Girl Geek X CCPA via TechLink:

  1. Apply to Mentor with TechLink by January 18, 2024.
  2. Complete your Live Scan fingerprinting as required by Oakland Unified School District and Oakland Education Fund policy for virtual volunteer clearance for California.

Questions? Email rafael@oaklandedfund.org

We are looking for TechLink VOLUNTEERS to meet virtually with CCPA sophomores and juniors during the Spring 2024 semester!

Volunteer Mentors will meet on Fridays for ~11 sessions virtually from February thru April 2024.

While TechLink is a virtual mentorship program, Mentors are welcome to volunteer IRL and have lunch with their Mentees at the East Oakland school.

Thank you so much for supporting Oakland public schools and students!

STUDENT PROJECT FEEDBACK (WINTER EXPO NIGHT IS JANUARY 25, 2024)

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Girl Geek X volunteers support public school students and educators at Coliseum College Prep Academy (CCPA) in East Oakland. The school entrance is on the corner of 66th Ave and International Blvd. (map)

On Thursday, January 25, 2024 (5:30pm-7pm), CCPA educators and students will be joined by Girl Geek X community volunteers to receive feedback on Senior Capstone Projects.

Sign up to volunteer with us on January 25!

AFRICAN-AMERICAN READ-IN AT BELLA VISTA ELEMENTARY IN OAKLAND ON FEBRUARY 14, 2024

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VOLUNTEER ON FEB 14 – READ BOOKS TO BELLA VISTA ELEMENTARY STUDENTS!

Bella Vista Elementary is located by Oakland’s Highland Hospital.

On Wednesday, February 14, 2023 (9:30am-11:00am), Girl Geek X Community Volunteers will read books to 2-3 elementary school classes that celebrate African-American culture in the 90-minute volunteer shift. Books and sample questions to guide conversations are provided by the Oakland Education Fund.

Volunteers do not need to identify as African-American to participate, and those who do identify as such are encouraged to participate and share about their culture with students.

SIGN UP FOR VOLUNTEERING AT THE AFRICAN-AMERICAN READ-IN ON OCTOBER 2!

Don’t forget to spread the word and invite your coworkers & friends to join you in volunteering! Volunteering together not only strengthens our impact, but also provides a chance to bond.

This event is organized in partnership with the nonprofit Oakland Public Education Fund, which connects groups with schools to make a positive impact on school culture and student achievement through relevant and meaningful volunteer projects.

Our partnership goal is to support students in East Oakland, CA by partnering on a variety of volunteer activities throughout the school year β€” from volunteering on-campus to field trips to tech companies.

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girl geek x osv impact reports