Natalie Ahn
Independent Game Developer at BlueSpruce Interactive
Oakland, California, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolNatalie Ahn is an independent game developer and educator based in Oakland with nine years of professional experience bridging data science, machine learning, and interactive experiences. She teaches at UC Berkeley while running BlueSpruce Interactive, applying research-grade NLP/ML techniques to game design and data-driven storytelling. Previously she led content data science at Nextdoor after scaling Hoodline’s analytics team through acquisition, bringing product-focused modeling and experimentation expertise. Her background spans academic research—building open-source Python tools for text analysis and entity matching—to hands-on geopolitical field work and journalism, giving her work a rare mix of computational rigor and real-world context. She combines graduate-level training in public policy and international economics with an undergraduate grounding in computer science, enabling interdisciplinary solutions that surface human-centered signals from messy text and civic data. A detail people often miss: her career threads international reporting and policy advising into technical roles, which informs games and teaching that emphasize narrative, data provenance, and societal impact.
10 years of coding experience
8 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD Public Policy, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD Public Policy at University of California, Berkeley, Goldman School of Public PolicyMaster of Arts Strategic Studies and International Economics, Master of Arts Strategic Studies and International Economics at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS)Bachelor of Arts International Relations (Minor in Computer Science), Bachelor of Arts International Relations (Minor in Computer Science) at Stanford University
Github Skills (8)
r9
bash8
python7
import-data3
jupyter2
control-flow2
data-science2
jupyter-notebook2
Programming languages (2)
Github contributions (5)
dlab-berkeley/regex-intro
Oct 2016 - Oct 2016
Contributions:35 commits, 35 pushes, 1 comment in 19 days
natalieahn/espmorfo
Jul 2017 - Jan 2018
Contributions:24 commits, 23 pushes, 1 branch in 5 months
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