The 25 Most Powerful Women Engineers In Tech

Jocelyn Goldfein is responsible for new product design and architecture in Facebook's crucial engineering department.

Her teams work on News Feed, search, and photos.

Before Facebook, Goldfein was a vice president at VMware. Like many of the other women on this list, Goldfein is also a mentor helping young women enter the engineer field.

As the woman tasked with turning around Yahoo, and someone who is unafraid of controversy, Mayer is arguably the most visible woman engineer in tech.

She was employee No. 20 at Google and the company's first female engineer. She helped Google develop its search technologies and worked on a long list of other key products including images, maps, books, news, and the toolbar.

She also sits on the board of directors of Walmart.

At Box, Kimber Lockhart leads the web application engineering team that builds many of the new features on Box.

She landed at Box when the company acquired her startup, Increo Solutions, in 2009. As CEO of Increo, she created a collaboration service called Backboard.

Maja Mataric is a professor at the University of Southern California who builds robots to help people with special needs.

Her robots can help stroke patients, children with autism, children at risk for obesity, older folks suffering from Alzheimer's and more.

Very cool, innovative and important stuff.

She is one of the 2013 recipients of ABI's Women of Vision Awards.

Diane Greene co-founded VMware—one of the most powerful enterprise companies around. She took it public in 2007 and left the company in 2008.

Today, Green is on Google's board of directors and she's an advisor and angel investor to startups. Some of her startups include Nicira, bought by VMware in 2012 for $1.26 billion and Cloudera.

Vicki Hanson is a professor at the University of Dundee and a research staff member emeritus for IBM Research.

Her speciality is the intersection between computers and people with special needs.

She's accumulated a long list of awards for her work. She helps companies understand how to design everything from software to touchscreens.

She is one of the 2013 recipients of ABI's Women of Vision Awards.

Lauren States is responsible for IBM's uber important cloud computing strategy which includes things like its Smarter Planet initiative and business analytics. She's a long time IBMer who joined as a systems engineer right after college in the late 1990s.

She worked just about every job possible at IBM, from executive assistant, to technical sales in the software group. She also launched one of IBM's internal leadership development programs.

Does she look familiar? She stars in one of IBM's Smarter Planet TV commercials.

Marianna Tessel runs a big engineering group at VMware.

She oversees a team of more than 200 people who work on the technology needs of VMware's 2,000+ partners. Marianna holds several patents, too. 

Jen Fitzpatrick is one of Google’s earliest employees. She joined the company in 1999 where she first worked on making Google's search results better.

She's also worked on Google’s user interface, its Web Directory search service, Google Maps and lots of other projects. She took over Google's geo-loco mobile tech, the area that area that Marissa Meyer worked on before she moved to Yahoo.

Padmasree Warrior joined Cisco in 2007 and became the company's chief strategy officer last year, while still holding on to her CTO role.

She's received an armful of awards so far in her career, including being inducted into the Women in Information Technology International Hall of Fame.

Warrior has begun to mentor women-founded startups such as the one being worked on by Aarthi Ramamurthy, cofounder of True&Co.

When EMC bought Silver Tail Systems last year for an undisclosed sum, it acquired Laura Mather, one of the world's experts in fighting Internet fraud.

She cofounded Silver Tail in 2008. It makes anti-fraud systems used by banks and e-commerce sites.

She is also the Managing Director of Operational Policy for the Anti-Phishing Working Group, a non-profit dedicated to fighting email-based security threats known as phishing, pharming and spoofing.

Ruchi Sanghvi landed at Dropbox after it bought her startup, Cove, in February. Cove was working on a collaboration product.

Sanghvi was Facebook’s first female engineer. She led product management for Facebook Platform and Facebook Connect, among other projects.

Andrea Burbank joined Pinterest last summer from Microsoft where she worked on Bing.

She landed at Microsoft from Powerset, a company that created a natural language search engine. It was acquired by Microsoft for $100 million in 2008.

Pinterest, a social networking site popular with women, is also becoming known in the industry as a great place for women engineers. So far it's nabbed them from Apple, Quora, Google, YouTube, Bing/Powerset, and LinkedIn.

Selina Tobaccowala is leading the engineering team at popular survey site, SurveyMonkey.

She is well-known for founding Evite.com, which was sold to Ticketmaster for an undisclosed sum.

Paula Long is the CEO and co-founder of startup DataGravity but she's better known as the co-founder of EqualLogic, a storage company acquired by Dell in 2007 for $1.4 billion.

DataGravity is quickly becoming a big data startup to watch. It secured a $30 million round of venture funding in January from Andreessen Horowitz ($42 million total).

Long is also board member for online storage service SugarSync, and advises for several other storage startups, too.

Wang leads the engineering team at Minted, a startup that crowd sources designs for printed paper products like wedding invitations and personal stationary.

She came to Minted with 11 years of experience leading engineering teams at Google and Microsoft, on projects like Desktop Search (for which she won a Google Founder's Award), Gmail, Google Lively, and Microsoft Flight Simulator.

Niniane has a whopping 33 patents to her name.

Mary Ann Davidson is the Chief Security Officer at Oracle which means she's responsible for making sure that Oracle's products don't have big security flaws.

She's also the public face for Oracle in various security tech circles, like serving on the boards of various groups including the prestigious Information Systems Security Association (ISSA). She was recently named to the ISSA Hall of Fame.

Jayshree Ullal is CEO of Arista Networks which competes with Cisco by offering super-fast network equipment for data centers.

She came to Arista from Cisco, where she had been a senior vice president for its uber important, $10 billion Data Center, Switching and Services group.

Jennifer Chayes is a distinguished scientist at Microsoft. She co-founded Microsoft's New England facility in Cambridge.

Before launching the Cambridge facility, she was a leader at Microsoft's Redmond Research and was a professor of Mathematics at UCLA before that.

She has co-authored some 110 scientific papers and has more than 25 patents.

Chayes serves on a gi-normous list of boards including the Turing Award Selection Committee of the Association for Computing Machinery, and Women Entrepreneurs in Science and Technology.

As the Chief Scientist at Bitly, Hilary Mason studies the realtime Internet doing a mix of research and engineering.

She's also a star in New York's tech scene, a co-founder of HackNY. That's a non-profit that matches engineering students with startups. She's an advisor to a bunch of organizations, too, including TechStars New York.

Mason has an armload of accolades to her credit including the TechFellows Engineering Leadership award.

Diane Bryant is Intel's former CIO. Last year she was handed responsibility for the $10 billion  Datacenter and Connected Systems Group.

That's the unit that covers Intel's products in enterprise computing and cloud tech.

The Anita Borg Institute today named Intel as the Top Company for Technical Women in 2013.

Stormy Peters is a key figure at Mozilla, the company responsible for the Firefox browser and lots of other cool software projects.

She cut her teeth at HP, teaching them about open source. She also held the high-profile role running the GNOME Foundation. GNOME is a key project for the Linux operating system.

Peters is also an advisor for various big open source conferences, and is founder and president of the non-profit Kids on Computers, which builds computer labs for schools in underprivileged neighborhoods.

Yvonne Schneider leads a global tech team at American Express.

She is particularly focused on corporate payments, global business travel businesses, and HR. She's been in the tech field for more than 25 years, starting in the energy industry working on mainframes.

Yvonne is also a known for her many years contributing to the Houston Food Bank.

Meenakshi Chatterjee is helping run Twitter's huge data center, and keeping the Fail Whale away.

She joined a few months ago learning her craft by building high-end servers and storage systems at HP and 3PAR, a company HP acquired in 2010 for $2.35 billion.