# Caitlin Westerfield > Software Engineer at Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Location: San Francisco Bay Area, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/caitlinwesterfield Hi! I am a software engineer at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative on the Education Initiative Learning Platform Team. I am particularly interested in using technology to address equity gaps within the education system and guide policy decision-making. Check out my website at http://caitlinwesterfield.com to learn more about my experiences! ## Work Experience ### Software Engineer @ Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Jan 2021 – Present | Redwood City, California, United States - Spearheaded as Tech Lead the development of Readiness Checks – a year-long project with a team of eight engineers that culminated in the launch of in-platform automated pre-assessments. This tool allows teachers to assess their students' prior knowledge of the upcoming unit's curriculum, then provides quick and actionable recommendations for adjustments to their lesson plan in response to the data. - Contributed to a recommendation system associated with Specialized Support Profiles (SSPs) - a hub for teachers to share knowledge about students with IEPs, 504s, and other targeted interventions. Teachers can now see SSP data along with relevant interventions for individual students directly within their lessons plans. ### Finance Fellow @ Sara Gideon for Maine Jan 2020 – Jan 2020 | Portland, Maine, United States - Supervised a team of interns for the finance team, during which time the team raised $39.4 million in the third quarter – more than any race in Maine history, second-largest for a senate race nation-wide, and quadruple our Republican opponent Susan Collins. Projects included researching donors, preparing for national fundraisers, phone banking to solicit donations from high capacity donors, and buttressing critical operations in campaign finance compliance. - Automated in Python integral tasks for the finance team including calculating giving history for potential donors, standardizing contributor information for NGP, and streamlining the generation of thank you notes in order to significantly increase efficiency and output for the whole team. - Supplemented the overarching campaign effort during Get Out the Vote by knocking on over 1,500 doors for the field team, utilizing constituent pressure to expand access to absentee voting for 10 Maine municipalities with the voter protection team, and staffing both drive-in Sara Gideon rallies for the political team. ### Software Engineering Intern @ Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Jan 2019 – Jan 2019 | Redwood City, CA - Built accessibility tools in React aimed at improving the learning experience for students with IEP's and English Language Learners including Voice Typing and Text to Speech. - Introduced handwriting recognition into the student math editor to allow students to convert their handwritten math into LaTeX that is inserted into their document. - Integrated a Ruby on Rails logging system into the Notebooks (student document system) codebase to log student and teacher usage of editor functionality and determine areas for further improvement. ### Research Development Programmer @ The LILY Lab, Yale University Jan 2017 – Jan 2019 | New Haven, CT - Redesigned translation software for the Machine Translation for English Retrieval of Information in Any Language (MATERIAL) project using transfer learning for a cross-lingual information retrieval system specifically for low-density and surprise languages, with training data in Swahili and Tagalog. - Created and updated the All About NLP (AAN) website interface and database with a focus on improving search queries through machine learning as part of a team of developers. ### President @ Float - Yale Women in Computer Science Jan 2017 – Jan 2019 | New Haven, CT ### President @ Yale Society Of Women Engineers Jan 2017 – Jan 2019 | New Haven ### Technology Development Intern @ AT&T Jan 2018 – Jan 2018 | Chicago, IL - Used Grafana and Prometheus to visualize incoming data for all the CSTA K8S environments from MongoDB representing worldwide cyber security threats and attacks on the AT&T servers into order to debug, monitor, and track performance and resource utilization. - Enhanced 10 Java codebases for the Corporate Security & Threat Analytics (CSTA) team to remove potential security flaws indentified by Veracode Greenlight. - Built a prototype UI for the new Mobility Security Dashboard using Angular and C3.js. ### Staff Reporter @ Yale Daily News Jan 2016 – Jan 2017 | New Haven, CT ### Research Intern @ Northwestern University Jan 2015 – Jan 2016 | Evanston, IL - Researched the RAS pathway in Caenorhabditis elegans using R with the goal of understanding the factors that cause abnormal genotypes to produce normal phenotypes. ## Education ### Bachelor of Science (B.S.) in Computer Science and Religious Studies Yale University ### Master of Science - MS in Data Analytics and Policy The Johns Hopkins University ### Mobile Software Development AIT-Budapest ### Evanston Township High School (ETHS) ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/caitlin-westerfield - Portfolio: https://www.caitlinwesterfield.com --- Source: https://flows.cv/caitlinwesterfield JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/caitlinwesterfield/resume.json Last updated: 2026-04-11