Polina has enjoyed tinkering with computers from a young age. She earned a bachelor’s degree from Rutgers University with a double-major in Information Technology & Informatics and Psychology. She’s also a Recurse Center alum.
Currently, she’s a Staff Engineer in Squarespace’s Data org, responsible for architecting and scaling a platform delivering event-based insights across customer segments and products. Polina is an expert in all things data reliability and contributed this knowledge to a book, Implementing Service Level Objectives (O’Reilly, 2020).
She’s a mom to two small children, loves snowboarding, and endlessly perfecting her gazpacho recipe.
Do the hard stuff
Polina Giralt talks about how some of the most impactful technical work is about unwinding a humungous mess. This talk is about lessons learned over my career about executing challenging projects. The types of projects with politics, drama, tech debt, or past failed attempts. How do we know if the project is worth doing? Why has it failed before? Who’s blocking it? How do we know when to cut our losses and pause or cancel the project?
Influencing without management authority as a senior individual contributor
Effectively communicating technical expertise.
