The Hackbright Community Welcomes You

Hackbright is a community of women driving to #changetheratio in the tech industry. Women from different nationalities, careers, and backgrounds are all welcome to join us at Hackbright Academy to hear inspiring stories from Hackbrighters who are successfully working as software engineers.

How Attending This Event Could Benefit You

This is an excellent opportunity to learn more about the Hackbright experience and gain industry insight for a career transition, whether you are a prospective student, a recent grad, or an interested community member.

Panelists

Annette Ambriz

Annette has a passion for learning and exploring. While completing a chemistry major at San Francisco State University she was first exposed to computer programming through prerequisites. She fell in love with the analytic structure and logic-based procedural thinking! Since having been transitioned and promoted to Software Engineer II at Credit Karma, Annette has built the backend for scalable microservices in Scala. She has taken a particular interest in functional programming and Google’s TensorFlow machine learning API. Annette continues to expand her programming knowledge through technical courses and mentorship opportunities. On weekends, you’ll usually find Annette loading open-source machine learning data sets, such as Dota2 games’ results into a TensorFlow model to make random predictions about an ideal hero’s configuration of strengths and weaknesses to another teams’ players. And brunching in Hayes Valley.

Marissa Skudlarek

Marissa graduated from Hackbright in June 2019 and is now a software engineer at Lex Machina, a legal analytics software company. Prior to making the career transition to tech, she worked in corporate governance and in immigration law while seeing, writing, and producing theater on her nights and weekends. While it may seem unusual to go from theater to tech, Marissa has enjoyed finding ways to bridge her old passion and her new one. For her Hackbright final project, she developed Wordsworth.us, an app that allows historical fiction writers to check their work for linguistic accuracy. Links to Wordsworth have been retweeted over 550 times by members of the tech and writing communities! And, in both her playwriting and her programming, Marissa seeks to write well-structured scripts that instigate action with elegance, wit, and efficiency.

Anna Kiefer

Kiefer is a software engineer and sustainability professional originally from Washington, D.C. She is currently a backend engineer at the ML company One Concern. Anna is interested in developing software for sustainability and energy applications. Prior to attending Hackbright, Kiefer worked in World Wildlife Fund's Climate and Renewable Energy team growing its corporate carbon reduction and renewable energy programs. From 2012 to 2014, Kiefer worked at Carnegie Council in New York, NY. Prior, she traveled to the Jama-Coaque Ecological Reserve in coastal Ecuador to research water quality and reforestation efforts. She attended NYU, graduating with honors and a dual major in politics and broadcast journalism. She loves problem-solving, long-distance running, and calculus.

What We Have Lined Up for the Panel

• Explore navigating the software space as a female engineer
• Hear from recent graduates about what their career transition was like
• Learn how the Hackbright curriculum prepares graduates for their new roles as software engineers
• Gain knowledge on what the interview process consists of and some of the best and worst practices to land your first role

We'll See You There!

RSVP by registering for the free event today before the tickets are all gone.