Five Tech Industry Leaders Join CodePath’s Engineering Brain Trust

Since our inception, CodePath has helped over 10,000 students from underrepresented backgrounds receive the training, mentorship, and community necessary to achieve excellence and reach their highest pinnacle of success in technology. 

Because of this impact, we have been fortunate enough to attract partnerships with some of the world’s most esteemed technology leaders who see the effects of our programming and graciously support us.

Today, we are thrilled to announce that five engineering leaders are joining CodePath as part of our newly formed Engineering Brain Trust (EBT). The EBT is a committee of senior technical leaders who will bring industry insights to inform our future curriculum roadmap and advise on industry needs and best practices. 

The EBT will be instrumental as we scale the CodePath platform and community over the next two years. As engineering leaders, they will advise CodePath on what we need to be doing to prepare our students not just to land an interview or job offer, but to succeed as engineers and leaders in the workplace. Additionally, bringing their deep technical expertise, EBT members will advise on how our learning platform and curriculum can remain a stellar, engineer-designed, educational experience for students, while continuing our pursuit of scale.

Not only will the EBT help us scale our impact, but the group will provide the highest level of knowledge that will advance the depth and breadth of our curriculum, further improving upon the quality of our programming and ensuring that our students achieve the highest level of excellence possible in their technology careers.

Tech Excellence For All 

When you visit our site to learn more about the Engineering Brain Trust and its members, you will notice a new look to CodePath. We are excited to expand the site to include more resources, tools, and community elements to aid students, universities, and tech leaders in their pursuit of excellence.

When we use the term “tech excellence,” we are referring to our commitment to delivering students the essential combination of skill, access, and opportunity that leads to a successful career in engineering. The EBT and new website reflect our commitment to tech excellence for all. 

Tech excellence can be within reach for anyone, if given the right resources and opportunities. 

At CodePath, we help our students become the best engineers they can be through free access to relevant, hands-on technical training, career guidance, mentors, and community–created by engineers, for engineers. 

About The CodePath Engineering Brain Trust

The EBT is a small, by-invitation only group of leaders who share CodePath’s mission of building a more equitable tech sector. These individuals will contribute their expertise through annual working sessions, mentorship opportunities, and networking events to support CodePath programming.

In 2021, CodePath served 4,980 students (over 70% of whom identify as Black, LatinX, Indigenous or low-income) at over 70 colleges/universities including 9 HBCUs with over 85% of CodePath's Black/LatinX alumni working in tech as software engineers. The brain trust will provide critical expertise to help us double student enrollment to reach at least 10,000 students annually and ensure 65% of our students achieve technical internships and full time job offers.

We know that this is no easy feat, and we are thrilled to welcome the following industry leaders who are aligned to help us accomplish this ambitious goal.

Dwana Franklin-Davis is the CEO at Reboot Representation Tech Coalition, a partnership of leading tech companies which have committed to doubling the number of Black, Latina, and Native American women graduating with computing degrees by 2025. Previously, Dwana worked as the Vice President Technology at Mastercard with experience roadmapping and leading technology teams, making strategic decisions using experienced-baked judgment, and overcoming complex business challenges in high profile leadership roles. Dwana is also passionate about external representation as a spokeswoman.

Vivek Vaidya is the Co-founder, General Partner, and CTO of super{set}, a startup studio that founds, funds, and builds data driven technology companies. Previously, Vivek was the CTO of Salesforce Marketing Cloud, and has held multiple other co-founder roles, building industry leading technology companies in enterprise software, data management, analytics, and machine learning/AI over the last 25 years.

Steve Newman founded Scalyr (acquired by SentinelOne), one of the fastest-growing B2B companies built for engineers by engineers, providing a blazing fast log management platform for the DevOps front line. He is now CTO, Data Services at SentinelOne, and also works to support organizations tackling climate change. Previously, Steve was a co-founder of Writely (aka Google Docs).

Sona Venkat is the Vice President of Engineering and Head of Cloud Product and Customer Success at Comcast. Sona was previously a General Manager at Microsoft and SVP at SAP, where for more than 20 years she has helped to shatter the glass ceiling in the technology industry. Her cross-functional expertise spans product management, engineering, corporate strategy, and business development.

Mike Curtis serves on the Board of Directors at Zendesk, is a member of ICONIQ Capital’s Technical Advisory Board and serves as a Trustee at Harvey Mudd College. He is an active investor and advisor with many early stage companies. Previously Mike was Head of Engineering at Airbnb. Prior to that he held senior roles at Meta and Yahoo. Mike is a dedicated leader that champions great user experiences and finds creative solutions to business and technical challenges.

We're delighted and honored to have the support of these extraordinary engineering leaders as part of CodePath’s Engineering Brain Trust. With their guidance, we are going to be able to drastically scale the impact that our program has already made on diversifying the tech pipeline. 

As we often say, “To be the best, you have to learn from the best.” The members of the Engineering Brain Trust certainly prove best in class, and, with their help, CodePath students will continue to be served the best curriculum, mentorship, and community necessary to achieve tech excellence in their careers.