In celebration of Ada Lovelace Day on Tuesday, here is Hackbright Academy’s list of 12 inspiring Chief Technology Officers (CTOs) who happen to be women. The newest addition to this list of female CTOs is Gerri Martin-Flickinger, freshly appointed to the Starbucks CTO position last week! Learn about these amazing 12 female CTOs below –
#1 – Rent the Runway CTO Camille Fournier
CTO Camille Fournier most recently led engineering at Rent the Runway in New York City. She shares advice for new engineering managers in her blog post “Engineering Management for Young Bloods”. Her LinkedIn profile states that she is open to serving on your advisory board, and possibly CTO of your startup. We predicted last year she would become CTO at a Fortune 500 company – keep an eye on this one! Follow her on Twitter at @skamille.
#2 – GoDaddy CTO Elissa Murphy
Elissa Murphy is the CTO and Executive Vice President at GoDaddy, an Internet domain registrar and web hosting company. She left a coveted post as Vice President of Engineering at Yahoo! for Hadoop and cloud services to overhaul GoDaddy’s engineering, leading Wired magazine to declare this year that “GoDaddy Isn’t the Company You Think It Is”. She currently has 15 patents issued and more than 19 patents pending in the areas of distributed systems, cloud, machine learning and security.
#3 – Starbucks CTO Gerri Martin-Flickinger
Gerri Martin-Flickinger was named Starbucks company’s Chief Technology Officer last week, and will begin at their Seattle headquarters in November. Prior to Starbucks, Gerri was Senior Vice President and CIO at Adobe, and CIO at VeriSign. Last week, the COO at Starbucks wrote in an internal email: “I am looking for Gerri to not only be a great leader of our global IT function but to also contribute her expertise to help shape the global strategy and the technical architecture that we are building to power Starbucks into the future.” Follow her on Twitter at @GMFlickinger.
#4 – SurveyMonkey CTO Selina Tobaccowala
Selina Tobaccowala began her career as an entrepreneur — she started Evite out of her college dorm room, and sold the company to Ticketmaster in 2001. Selina was Senior Vice President of Product and Technology at TicketMaster, where she managed the 200-person Product, Technology and Operations team. Selina is now CTO and President at SurveyMonkey, a software-as-a-service-company based in Palo Alto, California. Selina was named in “21 Rising Technical Superstars: The Female Engineers Who Just May Become The Next Fortune 500 CTO!”. Follow her on Twitter at @selinato.
#5 – United States CTO Megan Smith
Megan Smith is the CTO of the United States – specifically, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. Before she became the CTO of the United States, Megan was Vice President at Google X – the group that made Google’s self-driving cars and other “moonshots” a reality. She holds degrees in mechanical engineering from MIT, and was named in last year’s “21 Rising Technical Superstars”. Follow her on Twitter at @USCTO.
#6 – ThoughtWorks CTO Rebecca Parsons
Rebecca Parsons is CTO of ThoughtWorks, a software application development company headquartered in Chicago. She has more than 20 years’ application development experience, in industries ranging from telecommunications to emergent internet services. She has published in both language and artificial intelligence publications, served on program committees, and reviews for several journals. Rebecca has extensive experience leading in the creation of large-scale distributed object applications and the integration of disparate systems. Follow her on Twitter at @rebeccaparsons.
#7 – Cisco CTO of Networked Experiences Susie Wee
Susie Wee is CTO of Networked Experiences and Vice President at Cisco, developing technologies and architectures for software-defined networks that provide improved operational, end user, and developer experiences with the network. She contributes to Cisco’s unified platform strategy by coupling applications to the converged infrastructure and developing systems for augmented collaboration. She has over 50 publications and 45 granted patents. Follow her on Twitter at @susiewee.
#8 – StubHub CTO Raji Arasu
Raji Arasu started as VP of Engineering at eBay, helping tackle problems involving scalability, traffic and payments in the rapidly evolving world of e-commerce. She was promoted to her current role of CTO at StubHub, an eBay company, and leads a team to create a personalized and intuitive experience for StubHub’s users while also staying on top of technology trends. Follow her on Twitter at @rarasu.
#9 – One Medical Group CTO Kimber Lockhart
Kimber Lockhart is CTO of One Medical Group, an innovative primary care practice funded by Silicon Valley venture capitalists. In college, she started a company which was acquired by Box. At Box, Kimber was a Director of Engineering before she was promoted to Senior Director of Engineering. Kimber was named in “21 Rising Technical Superstars: The Female Engineers Who Just May Become The Next Fortune 500 CTO!”. Follow her on Twitter at @kimber_lockhart.
#10 – Redfin CTO Bridget Frey
Bridget Frey is the CTO at Redfin, an online real estate company based in Seattle. Bridget joined the company in 2011 as the director of analytics engineering, and quickly worked her way up to vice president of engineering, and then senior vice president of engineering. Her CEO remarked when he told the company about her promotion to CTO, “This isn’t a change in responsibilities; it’s a recognition of the obvious: that Bridget is one of the best executives we have.” Follow her on Twitter at @SVBridget.
#11 – NovoEd CTO Farnaz Ronaghi
Farnaz Ronaghi is passionate about making education, a basic human right, more accessible and meaningful through collaboration. She took a leave of absence from work on her Stanford PhD thesis to pursue her education startup NovoEd, a leadership development and online learning solution provider, where she is now the CTO. Follow her on Twitter at @farnazr.
#12 – Moxxly CTO Santhi Analytis
Santhi Analytis is the CTO and co-founder of Moxxly, a San Francisco startup making a smart breast pump system for nursing mothers to pump anywhere and receive real-time data about their milk supply. She holds a PhD in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford, where her research focused on sensors and interfaces for MRI-guided interventions. Follow her on Twitter at @dranalytis.
This list was compiled by Angie Chang at Hackbright Academy, the leading engineering school for women.
Inspired by the women on this list? Learn more about how to become a software engineer through our 12-week fellowship program for women.
Looking to hire brilliant female engineers? The next opportunity to recruit from Hackbright Academy is December 1 in San Francisco – you are invited to recruit/partner with Hackbright Academy!
Let us know in the comments below the female CTOs you think should be on this list! 🙂