Elsa Birch

I'm Elsa and I like engineering and I like data. To me that means full stack collaboration all the way from instrumentation, though automation, and into presentation.

Data at Startups

Recently I've spent a few years on teams of under 20 people doing everything from data engineering to managing customer integrations. This recent work has applied my experience in data quality, reliability, and explainability.

Software Engineering

I joined Pinterest as a full stack Software Engineer. Over time I focused on data and became a tech lead on the Business Intellegence engineering team. In my later years at Pinterest I partnered with Finance and Infrastructure Engineering on cost allocation for cloud planning and governance.

Learning Fast from Broken Things

I spent two fiery years in interdisciplinary technical consulting at Exponent, where I provided rapid hands-on testing, troubleshooting, and litigation support related to consumer products such as appliances and automobiles.

Chemical Engineering Ph.D.

At Stanford I did my doctoral work in the lab of Markus Covert. There I spent my time building mathematical models of microbial metabolism. My favorite contribution was re-engineering the objective functions of steady state population models better acomodate the heterogeneity of single cells. My academic time included a more software engineering than is typical: to combine different types of modeling you need APIs and to code larger projects you need version control and testing. As an undergraduate I studied at the University of Colorado, Boulder.