Summary
Kate Studwell is a Staff Software Engineer with a decade of experience building developer-facing tools and productivity systems, most recently shaping Developer Experience at GitHub and now at Shopify. She blends hands-on engineering in Ruby, Rails, Go, TypeScript, React, and GraphQL with a background in product and project management, giving her a rare fluency across code, process, and people. Kate specializes in improving the “squishy” intersections of technology and culture—reducing friction in how teams work as much as in their tooling. Her prior roles include technical advising to SVP-level leadership, leading org-wide design reviews, and driving Codespaces adoption internally, reflecting a mix of strategic influence and executional delivery. Based in Durham, NC, she’s also expanding into computational linguistics, a thread that connects her BA in Linguistics with data-driven engineering work.
10 years of coding experience
15 years of employment as a software developer
Recurse Center
Ruby on Rails Developer Certification Ruby on Rails Development, Ruby on Rails Developer Certification Ruby on Rails Development at The Iron Yard
Collegium Hieronymi Pragensis
BA Linguistics Germanic Languages, BA Linguistics Germanic Languages at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill