Engineer Your Career

Boomie Odumade is a fractional CTO, a career coach, and an instructor. She’s a senior engineering leader with more than 20 years of experience across startups, nonprofits, and large enterprises, including Accenture, NPR, and Capital One. Boomie is also a board member for two nonprofits focused on advancing women and girls in STEM and is an experienced speaker. In this episode, we discuss: Why she...

Ei-Nyung Choi is an engineering leader, fractional CTO, technical advisor, and speaker. A full-stack engineer with more than 20 years of experience spanning mobile, web, and gaming, Ei-Nyung is passionate about mentoring founders and women in tech. In this episode, we discuss: The importance of being willing to learn and make mistakes Slowing down to help those behind you vs running at full speed...

Lauren Stoller, VP of Data and Analytics at Brigit, is an experienced Data Product Manager known for full product lifecycle success, from ideation to iteration. A big-picture thinker, she uses analytics for competitive advantage and empowers teams to solve problems creatively. She has broad industry experience across retail, e-commerce, finance, semiconductors, and early-stage start-ups. Lauren ho...

Jumoke Dada is a dynamic, visionary and technology leader whose sweet spot lies at the intersection of innovation, entrepreneurship, security, and education. With over 15 years of experience in corporate IT, and as the owner of Signature Red, she provides technology consulting services and has created platforms for women in tech. Two of her creations include the Tech Women Network, an online commu...

Po Linn (Fo) Chia is a Principal Software Engineer at Mindbody/Classpass, working primarily in the intersection of backend and DevOps. She graduated university with a degree in Japanese history, but pivoted to doing a coding bootcamp and the rest is history. In this episode we discuss: Fo’s journey from Humanities major to Staff Engineer The importance of mentorship and having a good manager Handl...

Josie Daw is a British full-stack developer and app developer actively contributing to South Korea's tech scene. She leverages technology to build impactful projects and especially loves to work on projects, whether as a developer or organizer, to create social impact. In this episode we discuss: Josie’s unconventional path to becoming a full-stack developer  How she gives back to the communit...

Remy Schor is the talent recruiter at Voxel51. With two decades of talent acquisition experience, both in agencies and as an internal recruiter, Remy brings extensive knowledge of what recruiters are looking for and what job seekers should expect from a good recruiter. In this episode we discuss: Practical advice on how to stand out among thousands of other applicants Remy’s journey to her current...

Tina Wright is an Area Tech Lead at Grammarly, and has worked as a software engineer at Coursera, TRI, and Google. In this episode we discuss: What is an area tech lead? Technical leadership as a generalist, rather than a specialist How to get the best from your team through a service leadership style The advice she would give her younger self Resources mentioned: Staff Engineer: Leadership Beyond...

Diana Stepner is a Product and Leadership Coach. With over 15 years of international product leadership experience, Diana has led numerous teams at companies such as the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Kayak, Pearson, and more. In this episode we discuss: How she went from aspiring fish-store owner with a Marine Biology degree to Product Manager in tech How the industry has evolved over the past two d...

Shama Keskar is a CTO, Founder, and mentor with experience leading engineering teams at Amazon, Google, and LinkedIn. Her background in nuclear physics and education gives her a unique perspective and a keen interest in exploring the power and potential of big data and analytics. In this episode we discuss: Shama's principles of leadership  How to turn a "work/life balance" break int...

Taz Minadakis is a Director of Engineering at YouTube with more than 15 years of professional experience building quality products and 10+ years of experience building high-performing teams at Google, Uber, and Microsoft. She led a development team building a touch-first browsing experience for Windows 8 and Surface SDK at Microsoft when touch screens were still an emerging technology. Taz is pass...

Natasha Vinnik is a Senior Engineering Lead for Gmail Client Foundations at Google. With over 20 years in engineering, Natasha has also led engineering teams at Box and Yahoo! She holds three patents in cloud-based technology. In this episode, we discuss: Natasha’s journey from an immigrant who couldn’t afford university to an engineering leader with a master’s degree Staying technical as a manage...

Pinar Ozlen is an Engineering Manager at Airbnb based in Paris, France. Before Airbnb, she served as an Engineering Manager at Whatsapp, and worked on Google Maps and Search as an engineer with Google. In this episode, we discuss: How she gained visibility in large organizations Her transition from "What am I building" to "Who am I working with" Defining a leadership style that...

Smita Ojha is the Senior Vice President of Engineering at Mindtickle, a market leader in enterprise sales software. Over the last two decades, Smita has led engineering teams at some of the largest tech companies - Microsoft, Meta, and Google. In this episode, we discuss: How to say yes to new opportunities outside of your comfort zone The importance of developing a diverse skillset to become a we...

Tamar Bercovici is the VP of Engineering at Box where she leads the Core Platform team in scaling the foundational platform for the Box Content Cloud. In her 13 years at Box, she scaled the cloud content management and file-sharing service to handle millions of queries per second searching hundreds of billions of records. Named one of Forbes Top 50 Women in Tech 2018, Tamar also ranked #1 on Okta...

A. J. Oxendine is the Tech Lead and Staff Software Engineer for the Home Feed product at Pinterest. She enjoys the creative process of building new things, figuring out how they work, and how she can make them better. This passion has led her to study music composition, art, graphic design. and now, software engineering. In this episode, we discuss: AJ's nontraditional path from design to engi...

Joy Ebertz is a Principal Software Engineer, prolific blogger, avid ultrarunner, and an advocate for increasing the number of women and minorities in Computer Science. At Split, Joy establishes technical direction for their backend team. Prior to Split, she worked at Box. At both Split and Box, Joy lead efforts around splitting monoliths into microservices, revamping authentication and authorizati...

Welcome to the trailer episode of Engineer Your Career, brought to you by WEST, a learning community that empowers women technologists through mentorship. Through this podcast, we’ll explore the different paths leaders have taken to grow their tech leadership, develop their influence, and gain insights from top women leaders  in the field. Hosted by Karen Ko and Heidi Williams.