# Elena Churilov > Software Engineer Location: Oakland, California, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/elenachurilov I got my start in linguistics, earning my undergraduate and graduate degrees in language and cognition. I spent some time working in industry on voice user interfaces, but soon discovered that the work I really wanted to do required a foundation in programming. So, I took some time to gain those skills and now I'm looking to get my start as a software developer. I'm fascinated by all the different ways that we communicate and coordinate with each other - how information gets passed along, understood, and acted upon. Any action taken by an agent - human, animal, computer - communicates information to others, which they in turn can act on. Once upon a time, my job was to simply record and transcribe those actions to learn their patterns. My goal now is to find a job where I can use that learning to build things that communicate efficiently and effectively, and which facilitate others to communicate and collaborate. ## Work Experience ### Software Engineer @ Fluxx Jan 2019 – Jan 2019 | San Francisco, California Reduced end-to-end test running time by 30% by streamlining Cypress tests Created backend support for storing and acting on user preferences for email notifications Upgraded all list views to support filtering, ElasticSearch, and export to CSV Implemented account recovery system based on industry best practices Upgraded payment and report CRUD to full-fledged pages instead of modals ### Speech & Language Manager @ Voicera Jan 2017 – Jan 2018 | Menlo Park, CA Collected user experience data from usage statistics and think-aloud testing Analyzed and presented data using Excel and Chartio/SQL Managed ASR training data collection, labeling, and transcription through Mechanical Turk and other crowdsource platforms Segmented, labeled, and transcribed audio data for machine learning in Praat Advised on voice user interface design ### Speech and Language Researcher @ Amazon Lab126 Jan 2016 – Jan 2017 | Sunnyvale, California Collected speech data for training far-field voice activated digital assistant devices Led team of researchers in collections in representative field environments Created documentation and trained new hires on data collection protocol Recruited and scheduled participants Researched and tested equipment for presenting stimuli, recording data, etc ### Graduate Student @ Stony Brook University Jan 2012 – Jan 2014 | Stony Brook, NY Student in Psychology PhD program under Susan Brennan Designed and conduct psycholinguistic research Maintained an up-to-date knowledge of relevant psychology and linguistics literature ### Research Assistant @ UCSD Language Production Laboratory Jan 2010 – Jan 2011 | San Diego, CA Worked under Matt Hall and Dr. Victor Ferreira Arranged appointments with research participants using Experimetrix Explained experimental task to participants Recorded participant language and gesture production data in audio and video formats and by hand Debriefed participants post-experiment Used video editing software to segment the raw video into discrete clips for each trial, then coded the subjects’ responses in preparation for statistical analysis Advised on research equipment and methods ### Research Assistant @ UCSD Computational Psycholinguistics Lab Jan 2010 – Jan 2010 | San Diego, CA Worked under Dr. Roger Levy Annotated the syntactic/semantic properties (attachment sites of relative clauses) in sentence completions produced by subjects Created stimuli for an online sentence-comprehension study by crafting sentence completions that were visually identical following the target word pairs in the stems ### Intern @ Systran Jan 2008 – Jan 2009 | San Diego, CA Worked under Elke Lange and Alan Watkins Updated translation dictionary entries Edited dictionary entries for Farsi verb phrases to properly reflect which verb is the light verb Filtered out incorrect entries (nonwords, mislabeled words, misspellings) Collected and aligned parallel corpora Used regular expressions in Notepad++ to strip international news webpages of HTML in order to generate plaintext for building parallel corpora Evaluated automatic translations from Korean to English ### Research Assistant @ UCSD Computational Linguistics Lab Jan 2008 – Jan 2008 | San Diego, CA Worked under Henry Beecher and Dr. Andrew Kehler Preparing linguistic data for training linguistic algorithms Tagged bridging anaphora in a large linguistic corpus with their anchors and their semantic relation to their anchors ## Education ### Computer Software Engineering App Academy ### Master of Arts (M.A.) in Psychology Stony Brook University ### Bachelor of Arts (BA) in Psychology and Linguistics (with specialization in Cognition and Language) UC San Diego ### La Jolla High School ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/elenachurilov - Portfolio: https://elena-churilov.com --- Source: https://flows.cv/elenachurilov JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/elenachurilov/resume.json Last updated: 2026-03-29