12 Inspiring Female Staff Engineers to Watch in 2018

This month, we celebrate 12 diverse women in the Silicon Valley who currently hold a “Staff Engineer” title — a mark of hard-earned engineering prestige for the woman who holds it, and potential signal of a company with an engineering culture that both hires & promotes women engineers! Job titles & seniority vary across employers, and often the size of company (early-stage startup vs. Fortune 500) hints to how many engineers & layers of hierarchy exist in career ladders. With just the top ~10% of Google engineers awarded a title of “Staff Engineer” or higher (according to Quora), and women representing just a quarter of the computing workforce, 2018 represents an opportunity for women in engineering to blaze trails for others to follow as leaders building new technologies & future companies!

Here are 12 inspiring Staff Engineers to Watch in 2018:

Arezou Keshavarz, Google Staff Engineer

Arezou was promoted to Staff Engineer at Google this year, where she is a machine learning and optimization expert. She has been at Google for almost five years now. She began her career as a Software Engineer at Google, before being promoted to Senior Software Engineer and now Staff Engineer. She earned her B.S. Electrical Engineering from University of Toronto, and both M.S. and Ph.D in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University.

Joy Ebertz, Box Staff Engineer

Joy is a Staff Engineer at Box, where she spent almost two years as an engineering manager before returning to her technical roots. She leads engineering efforts and designed solutions for Box’s workflow integration with IBM. Joy has a fantastic blog, where she writes about many topics including why she left management. She earned her B.S. in Mathematics and Computer Science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she also minored in Music. Follow her on Twitter at @jkebertz.

Kelly Ellis, Mailchimp Staff Engineer

Kelly joined Mailchimp as a Staff Engineer this year. Prior to Mailchimp, she was an engineering lead at Medium for the platforms engineering team. Prior to Medium, she was at Google for over four years as a senior software engineer in infrastructure, specifically Google’s (internal) social graph and ACL data store. She earned her B.S. in Math and Computer Science from the University of Virginia. Follow her on Twitter at @justkelly_ok.

Megha Punjani, Gigamon Staff Engineer

Megha joined Gigamon as a Staff Engineer this year. Prior to Gigamon, she was engineer at Cisco for almost a decade, where she led outreach for Cisco’s Women in Science and Engineering group to partner with companies and groups across Silicon Valley and promote STEM careers and advance technical skills among women. She earned her B.E. in Information Technology from Delhi College of Engneering. Follow her on Twitter at @meghapunjani.

Miriam Pena, AdRoll Staff Engineer

Miriam is a Staff Engineer at AdRoll in San Francisco, where she designs and implements critical parts of their Real-Time Bidding infrastructure. She has over 10 years of experience in scalable, high performance, high concurrency, and high availability systems. Prior to AdRoll, she provided Erlang specialized consultancy in Sweden, Spain, Egypt and the US; for projects ranging from automobile to social networks and telecommunications. She earned her M.S. in Computer Science from La Coruña University in Spain.

Nashili Basathia, Qualcomm Staff Engineer

Nashili is a Staff Engineer at Qualcomm, where she’s been working for over six years. Prior to working at Qualcomm, she was a Senior Design Engineer at Atheros, QThink and Philips Semiconductors. She has history of working in the wireless industry, where she is skilled in semiconductors, physical design, and more. She earned her B.S.E.E. in Physics from St. Xavier’s College, M.S. in Physics from Institute of Science, and M.S.E.E. in Electrical Engineering from San Jose State University.

Purva Gujar, Dolby Staff Engineer

Purva is a Staff Engineer at Dolby, where she’s been working for over 12 years. She joined Dolby‘s Cinema Technology group in 2004, and has been a core engineer on Dolby Atmos Cinema Sound Processor CP850, a next-generation object-based audio technology. Disney’s “Brave” was the first movie to use this technology and “Gravity” was the first to get an Oscar in Sound Editing using Dolby Atmos. As a part of Dolby Atmos core engineering team, Purva attended Tech Oscars a few years ago. She earned her B.E. in Electronics and Telecommunications Engineering from Cummins College of Engineering and M.S. in Media Arts and Technology from UC Santa Barbara.

Saroj Yadav, Slack Staff Engineer

Saroj joined Slack as a Staff Engineer in 2016, where she is on the Infrastructure team. Prior to Slack, she was a Staff Engineer at Zendesk for four years. She served as tech lead for a project unifying microservices across Zendesk. In her spare time, Saroj has been an entrepreneur and avid traveler. She earned her B.Tech. in Computer Science from National Institute of Technology Kurukshetra in India, and M.S. in Computer Science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Follow her on Twitter at @sarojyadav.

Soumya Mahadevan, LinkedIn Staff Engineer

Soumya is a Staff Engineer at LinkedIn, working on growing the user base. She joined LinkedIn as a Senior Software Engineer, and was promoted after a few years to Staff Engineer. She considers herself a generalist with varied expertise, from mobile to backend. Prior to LinkedIn, Soumya was a senior engineer at Cisco Systems. She earned her M.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Sriprabha Gopalan, Walmart Labs Staff Engineer

Sriprabha is a Staff Engineer at Walmart Labs, where she was promoted from Senior Software Engineer. At Walmart Labs, Sriprabha contributes to the Open API and IoT team. Prior to Walmartlabs, she was a Software Engineer at Deutsch Bank. In her spare time, she mentors women in tech. She earned her B.E. in Computer Science from Visvesvaraya Technological University and M.S. in Computer Science from North Carolina State University. Follow her on Twitter at @shriprabha.

Vedavati Kale, Intuit Staff Engineer

Vedavati is a Staff Engineer at Intuit, where she’s worked for over 10 years on various Intuit products for small businesses that serve millions of customers, including Quickbooks. She earned her B.S. in Statistics from St. Xavier’s College and M.S. in Engineering from University of Mumbai.

Yuwen Dai, Palo Alto Networks Staff Engineer

Yuwen joined next-generation security company Palo Alto Networks as a Staff Engineer in 2016. Prior to joining Palo Alto Networks, she worked at Avaya Innovation, where she focused on backend design and development. She earned her M.S. in Computer and Information System Security / Information from Northwestern University and B.S. in Software Engineering from East China Normal University.

At Girl Geek Dinners in the Silicon Valley, we frequently meet distinguished women in engineering, from Principal Engineers (who organize Girl Geek Dinners at their Fortune 100 companies), to Software Architects leading technology at IBM and PayPal.

All genders are welcome — please share widely & invite your friends / colleagues to join us for this unique opportunity — learn something new & meet hundreds of dynamic women in tech / startups! Girl Geek Networking events are especially crucial for tech professionals looking for new jobs & opportunities. Not to mention learning from others how to navigate a successful career amidst office politics & the shifting future of work with new tech, etc. Join the Girl Geek community for events in 2018! ❤