🌻 About me

Hiiii!! My name is Victoria (aka vrk) and I'm a software engineer who lives in Brooklyn, NY.

I'm currently working for myself, exploring software that helps people create and be creative with paper ✂️

➡️ Check out my newsletter vrklovespaper to see the latest!

⬇️ Or keep scrolling to learn more stuff about me.

💼 Past experience

Before working for myself, I spent the last 4 years working at early-stage startups, and prior to that I had spent 8 years at Google, with a year teaching at Stanford in between.

• Most recently, I was an engineer at a startup called The Browser Company for a little over 2 years, hired in as one of the most senior engineers on the team with 13+ years experience. I wore a lot of hats at the company: I was involved with leadership, eng processes, recruiting and onboarding, in addition to owning our web stack and release process, and writing & shipping lots of code across product engineering, infrastructure and Chromium.
• Prior to that, I was VP of Engineering at another startup called Glitch, with a total of 5 teams and 15-20 people reporting into me: 2 EM-led eng teams, Product Eng and Platform/Infra, in addition to our product, design, and support teams.
• Prior to that, I was a Senior Engineer at Google for 8 years, 6 years as a tech lead across 4 major products, including Chrome, Maps, and VR.
• Another passion of mine is teaching. I taught for a year as a lecturer in the Stanford Computer Science department, and created & taught a web programming class while I was there. I occasionally still volunteer teach.

For dates and other details, see my linkedin.

💻 Technical fact sheet

• 13+ years experience as a software engineer
  • ~9 years as a tech lead
  • ~2 years as an eng manager
  • ~1 year as a CS teacher
• Technical skills
  • Expert at: Architecture, API design, general purpose software engineering, building whatever you want at whatever scale you want by the timeline we agreed upon. Also a domain expert in JavaScript, HTML/CSS, Node, and how to use modern web technologies without making a mess.
  • Extremely great at: TypeScript, NextJS, React, Firebase. Probably just a hair under "domain expert" in these things.
  • Competent in: AWS, GCP, Swift & MacOS development. Not a domain expert but very comfortable.
  • Used to be good but kinda forgot everything: C/C++, VR & three.js. Could get back into it pretty quickly if I brushed up.
• Misc
  • I also pride myself in writing excellent documentation and giving fun & accessible tech talks on complex topics.

💖 Personal fact sheet

• pronouns: she/her
• location: nyc
• originally from: washington state
• sign: scorpio
• ethnicity: half-white, half-korean
• languages spoken: english, korean sorta
• loves: cute things, gentle things, making stuff
• hates: scary things, gross things, stairs, too much standing

🌎 Online presence

twitter, substack, youtube, github, linkedin

💌 Contact

victoriakirst@gmail.com