Liz Borowsky
Liz Borowsky is a Senior Director of Engineering at Akamai Technologies, one of the world’s largest Internet infrastructure companies. As head of the Platform Mapping department, she is in charge of the secret sauce at the core of Akamai’s Intelligent Platform. Her team runs the software that controls the traffic on Akamai’s worldwide distributed network, routing roughly twenty-five percent of all internet traffic daily.
Liz has PhD and MS degrees in Computer Science from UCLA , and a BA in Mathematics from Williams College. She has tried the three major models of “What to do with a PhD in Computer Science?,” having worked in an Industrial
Research Lab, as a Professor, and in Industry. In Industry she has had roles as an individual contributor, starting as a software engineer, and in management up to her current role as Senior Director. Throughout her career the common thread tying these roles together is a focus on solving problems of optimization and coordination in distributed systems. She loves thinking about how pieces of a system with different characteristics can be made to work efficiently together. She currently applies this skill to both the technical and people management aspects of her role.