White House LGBTQ Tech & Innovation Summit

I am a lifelong tech nerd who went to law school to become an entertainment lawyer, and fell in love with intellectual property law. After 3 years in law school, I decided not to practice law. I’ve spent the past 4 years as a Contracts Manager for Amazon Lab126, Amazon’s R&D center for all of our devices (Echo, Fire TV, tablets, and e-readers). I managed end-to-end contracting and legal business processes for product development, IP, and engineering contracts for Amazon’s digital products. During my time on the legal team, I became enamored with Alexa and our Echo products–I love the ability Echo has to improve our customers’ everyday lives. So when the opportunity came up to pivot and leave legal to join Alexa, I jumped on it. As of March 2017, I’ve started a new career at Amazon as a Program Manager for the Applied Modeling and Data Science team for the Alexa Machine Learning organization. I can now truly say that I’m becoming a lesbian who techs.

I’m also very passionate about diversity, and am one of the founding board members of Amazon’s Bay Area Glamazon affinity group (LGBT focused). I fiercely believe that diverse companies will have a much stronger chance at changing the world for the better, and fight to disrupt traditional definitions of professionals and the tech industry every day. I’m energized now more than ever to create change when we need it the most.