Who
I'm Katherine.
I grew up outside Buffalo, NY and have a lot of stories from there (secret islands on creeks and winter bonfires). Headed to Cleveland for school (hacker societies and foam swords), landed in San Francisco in 2017 (corporate america and metal swords). I've been here since.
Outside of work, I fill my time with music (mostly bluegrass right now, though I have some decent classical and latin repertoire), swinging longswords at F3 Sword Academy in Oakland, or gardening with my chickens.
I recently wrapped up as Board President at California Music Center (2018-2024), invest through Portfolia's Femtech III fund, and am generally toying around with agentic AI on the side when not at work (and sometimes at work).
I care a lot about mentorship, especially for women in tech. I've been doing this long enough to have Opinions about sustainable careers, and I'm always happy to chat over coffee about navigating this industry: Connect on LinkedIn
Career
Started at Affirm! Leading Release Management.
SRE Engineering Manager at Cisco Meraki, leading Developer Pipelines team. Drove org-wide compliance (SSDF/SOC2/PCI) across 4,000+ engineers. Built compliance telemetry, led Sev1s, maintained 0% regretted attrition and top engagement scores.
Sr. Engineering Manager at Salesforce AI Platform. Founded and scaled the AI/ML Platform Quality org from 0 to 12 across four time zones. Shipped quality strategy for the secure LLM Gateway (prompt safety, PII masking, toxicity detection) for Einstein GPT.
Engineering Manager on Einstein AI's Quality Engineering team. Led release management, scenario testing, test tooling, and quality metrics across five AI/ML platform stacks. Built homegrown AI tooling that cut support workload by 30%.
Release Manager at Salesforce. Led 100+ emergency releases. Major Deployment Manager for Winter '19 (216 codeline). Co-led Spectre/Meltdown patch rollout. Proposed and built "release intelligence" using ML on live logs to predict customer impact. (It's still running in production.)
B.A. in Computer Science from Case Western Reserve University.