Women In Technology Speaker Series & Panel

LinkedIn Engineering builds state of the art systems and algorithms that connect the world's professionals to make them more productive and successful. Up and down the stack, from best of class distributed systems like Apache Kafka to cutting edge mobile frameworks and take-no-prisoners machine learning infrastructure, LinkedIn Engineering solves the hardest, most rewarding problems in the industry.

In this session of the LinkedIn SF speaker series we are opening up the discussion about women in tech with top female leaders talking about their work and their experience in the field. Designers, marketers, engineers, data scientists... This is an event for everyone in tech. We are using this night to encourage an open discussion about women in tech, to share work and research done by women, and to network.

The evening will go as follows:

6:00pm - 7:00pm - sign in and network cocktail hour

7:00pm - 7:30pm - breakout speaker series (you will choose your speaker at the door, first come first serve)

7:45pm - 8:15pm - women in technology panel with breakout speakers moderated by Prachi Gupta (https://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=5687200&authType=NAME_SEARCH&authToken=PEbf&locale=en_US&trk=tyah&trkInfo=clickedVertical%3Amynetwork%2Cidx%3A1-1-1%2CtarId%3A1427147377449%2Ctas%3Aprachi)

Subscribe to the LinkedIn SF Tech Talk Mailing List (https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1dUyujm_YuuiPbQRjL4C0ZAzXMh9G75T4F0Q7auT8pNM/viewform)

Featured Speakers

Gretchen Anderson (https://www.linkedin.com/in/gretchenanderson)Great Schools

Gretchen Anderson spent the first part of her career in design consulting for firms like frog design, Cooper, and Punchcut. For the past three years she has served as the VP of Product for GreatSchools, a national non-profit that helps parents get their kids a great education. Gretchen oversees design, product management and engineering and loves the challenge of helping design permeate an organization, not just products. Her past clients include Virgin Records, Samsung, and Johnson & Johnson. Most recently at GreatSchools, she works with local communities like Detroit and Indianapolis that are looking to improve education for their families. Gretchen is a Bay Area native who left only long enough to get a bachelor's degree from Harvard in History & Literature.

Leigh Honeywell (https://www.linkedin.com/in/hypatia)Heroku

Leigh is an experienced incident responder. She is a Security Engineer at Heroku (https://heroku.com/), a Salesforce.com (https://salesforce.com/) company. Prior to Heroku, she worked at Microsoft (http://microsoft.com/msrc),MessageLabs/Symantec (http://www.symantec.com/products-solutions/families/?fid=symantec-cloud), and Bell Canada. Founder of several hackerspaces, she is currently Chief Security Officer of Double Union (http://doubleunion.org/), a women’s hackerspace in San Francisco and advisor to several nonprofits focused on diversity issues in tech. Leigh has a Bachelors of Science from the University of Toronto where she majored in Computer Science (http://web.cs.toronto.edu/) andEquity Studies (http://utoronto.ca/equitystudies).

Sara Ortloff Khoury (https://www.linkedin.com/in/saraortloffkhoury)Walmart Labs

For over 15 years Sara has built and led high performance user experience design teams that apply human-centered design to help businesses thrive across desktop, tablet, mobile and kiosk platforms. She achieves this through a design-thinking approach, which focuses on customer empathy, experimentation, design, and innovation. As Vice President of User Experience Design and Research at Walmart Labs Sara is responsible for the native app and web research, design strategy and execution for a global omnichannel retail user experience at scale. Currently she is focused on leading the product design effort for a new commerce platform that combines the best of in-store and online features to deliver a breakthrough seamless shopping experience for Walmart, Asda and Sam’s Club customers around the world.

Kamilah Taylor (https://www.linkedin.com/in/kamilahtaylor)LinkedIn

A Senior Software Engineer in mobile at LinkedIn, Kamilah is one of the co-authors of the Kickstarter-funded ($30k raised) book, "Women in Tech: The Book!" She loves engineering products that are used by millions of people worldwide. Working in the mobile space is an opportunity to be intimately connected to the end user and to work end to end full stack on applications. Born in Jamaica, she grew up both in Kingston and Atlanta, Ga and spent her childhood playing with legos, reading books, swimming at the beach, and looking for fairies. She majored in Computer Science and Mathematics at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica, and got a M.Sc. in Computer Science (specializing in robotics) at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.