Laura Kogler
Senior Engineering Manager at Afresh
Oakland, California, United States
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolLaura Kogler is a Senior Engineering Manager with 12 years of experience leading teams to build reliable, testable software from the Bay Area. She has progressed from hands-on engineering at Pivotal Labs to technical leadership roles at Code for America and Afresh, where she now directs engineering strategy and delivery. With a PhD in Physics from UC Berkeley and a background in national labs, she brings rigorous, research-driven problem solving to product and platform challenges. Laura combines deep backend experience—including contributing to the Kotlin Spek testing framework by improving BDD-style readability and focused test execution—with a talent for coaching engineers and scaling organizations. Colleagues describe her as a manager who trades jargon for clarity and who turns complex technical debt into maintainable systems.
12 years of coding experience
18 years of employment as a software developer
PhD MA Physics, PhD MA Physics at University of California, BerkeleyBS Physics, BS Physics at University of WashingtonPhysics, Physics at Justus Liebig University Giessen
German, French, Italian
Github Skills (5)
kotlin10
spek10
tdd10
bdd10
testing10
Programming languages (8)
Github contributions (5)
spekframework/spek
Feb 2016 - Apr 2016
A specification framework for Kotlin
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:24 commits, 2 PRs, 2 pushes in 1 month
Contributions summary:Laura focused on enhancing the Spek framework by introducing keywords 'context', 'given', and 'on' as synonyms for 'describe', improving code readability and BDD-style test organization. They backfilled tests for the console runner, ensuring that focus-based testing across multiple files functions correctly. This work involved refactoring the test structure towards a tree-based model, enabling the implementation of focused tests and randomization of test execution.
testingspecificationbddkotlinspek
codeforamerica/autoclearance
May 2018 - Nov 2018
Clear My Record: Automatically clear convictions under prop 64
Contributions:75 commits, 28 pushes, 2 branches in 6 months
recordreactpropclear
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