Kathleen Vignos is a Director in Platform Engineering at Twitter, where she heads Twitter’s public cloud strategy and core infrastructure automation teams. She also leads Twitter’s internal engineering manager training program. Previously, she was Director of Engineering at Wired where she built the team that scaled the website to 1 billion page views a year. Over 20+ years she’s worked at two startups (one of which she founded), taught business software programming at the university level, won a hackathon, and developed dozens of websites. Other experiences include everything from being on call as a COBOL programmer for Y2K to modifying a React app for a hack week project. She regularly coaches engineering managers and female engineers on confidence and leadership. She holds BS and MS engineering degrees from UCLA and Michigan and serves on the Ambassador’s Council for local San Francisco non-profit, New Door Ventures.
SPEAKING
- #SheInspiresMe Panel, March 2019
- O’Reilly Velocity Conference, June 2018: “How to Keep Up Your Tech Skills (without annoying your teams)“
- North Bay Python, December 2017: “5 Leadership Skills Every Engineer Needs“
- Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, October 2017: Twitter EmpowHERment Panel, “Twitter Localization”
- Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, October 2017: Twitter Tech Women Talks, “Building a Twitter Bot with the Twitter API“
- O’Reilly Fluent Conference, June 2017: “Managing Engineering Teams through Constant Change” https://youtu.be/ci9CUWwgQOc (43:53)
- O’Reilly Velocity Conference, June 2017: “Managing Engineering Teams through Constant Change”
- Tech Essentials Design Course for the University of Southern California (Guest Interviewee)
- O’Reilly Fluent Conference Ignite Speaker, 2016
https://youtu.be/mYT4NF_Dsjg (5:07) - Day of Rest, WP REST API (London, UK) Speaker, 2016
https://youtu.be/X7HlPn2hzWg (37:37) - WordPress VIP Developer’s Conference Speaker, 2015
- Fastly Altitude Conference Speaker, 2015
https://youtu.be/xaG_z6N9O9M (32:53)
SIDE PROJECTS AND HACKATHONS
- Twitter Bot using the Twitter API (September 2017, node.js)
- Participant: Twitter Hack Week 2016 (programming in React)
- FIRST PLACE: Conde Nast “Built While Flying” Hackathon 2016. 22 teams, 200 participants. Project: Automated SEO Validator for Publishing
ARTICLES
- WIRED: “Programmers, lets earn the right to be called engineers“
- WIRED: “Why WIRED.com Migrated (And Why Your Site Should Too)“
- WIRED: “Our Director of Engineering on the New WIRED.com“
- http://www.wired.com/author/kvignos/
PODCASTS
- Interviewed on WIRED Webmonkey Podcast, “I Look Like An Engineer“
IN THE PRESS
- Interviewed for Fast Company, “How to Get a Job at Twitter,” March 2018
- Interviewed for WIRED article on sexism in Silicon Valley, June 2017:
- Women Who Code Profile
- Post Status Article: Should I use the WordPress REST API?
