# Katherine Vedder

> Senior Software Engineer/Computational Linguist

Location: Seattle, Washington, United States
Profile: https://flows.cv/katherinevedder

## Work Experience
### Senior Software Engineer @ Tyler Technologies
Jan 2022 – Jan 2022 | Seattle, Washington, United States
Worked on the team managing user authentication and authorization, including sign-in management using Okta and approval workflows for data publishing to specific audiences. Core backend code in Scala and Java with Postgres database.

### Senior Software Engineer @ Wildflower Health
Jan 2019 – Jan 2020 | Greater Seattle Area
Worked mainly in Typescript, designing and managing databases and workflows (MySQL, MongoDB, CouchDB) for ingressing and managing consumer-facing documentation on womens’ pregnancy and childcare health for mobile apps, on an almost fully-remote team distributed across the West Coast

### Southbound Hiker @ The Pacific Crest Trail
Jan 2018 – Jan 2018 | Washington, Oregon, California
Solo hiked 2,652 miles over 3.5 months from the Canadian border to the Mexican border along the Pacific Crest Trail. Skills include:

- eating the same thing every day
- finding a good camp spot
- recognizing when it's going to rain
- waking up before the sun and going to bed after it

### Senior Software Engineer @ Socrata
Jan 2015 – Jan 2018 | Seattle
Implemented a new search platform backed by Elasticsearch, written in Scala with ingress pipeline in Python
Designed and documented APIs used both internally and externally to interface with the search service 
Automated previously manual processes such as monthly maintenance windows and Elasticsearch schema migrations (Python/shell script)
Contributed to the team-wide migration from self-hosting on physical servers to AWS 
Acted as a liaison between teams within and outside of Engineering 
Contributed to the frontend Ruby/Rails, Angular, React, and Elixir codebases

### Graduate Student @ University of Washington
Jan 2014 – Jan 2015
Computational Linguistics MS

### Natural Language Understanding Research Engineer @ Nuance Communications
Jan 2011 – Jan 2014 | Greater Seattle Area
Wrote nightly web scrapers keep language models up to date 
Set up a StackOverflow-like Q&A tool (Django/Python) for offsite language contractors, reducing the time the annotation team spent answering individual questions and allowing contractors to answer each others' questions 
Created web-based statistics reporting and visualizations to help with contractor management 
Worked on building up and maintaining a MySQL database of human-annotated utterances for model training, as well as ETL pipelines between teams 
Managed ~30 remote annotation contractors, leading weekly guideline review meetings 
Created several domain-specific spelling correctors/data cleaners

### Computational Linguist @ Swype Inc.
Jan 2010 – Jan 2011
- Developed an in-house translation management system for our software localization.
- Created and contributed to SMS language models for several languages, including Finnish, Korean, Kazakh, and Urdu.
- Designed usable keyboard layouts for the various languages adapted to a mobile phone’s screensize limitations.


## Education
### Master's Degree in Computational Linguistics
University of Washington
Jan 2014 – Jan 2015

### BA in Linguistics
University of Washington
Jan 2006 – Jan 2010

### Sprachwissenschaft/Linguistics
University of Tübingen
Jan 2008


## Contact & Social
- LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/kavedder

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Source: https://flows.cv/katherinevedder
JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/katherinevedder/resume.json
Last updated: 2026-03-22