About

Anna J McDougall is a Software Engineer, Speaker, and Diversity Enthusiast with over 8 years of relevant experience. With a background in opera singing, Anna brings a unique perspective to the tech industry. She is passionate about programming and engineering, but also enjoys bringing joy and laughter to her team. Anna is committed to lifting up everyone she works with by sharing her expertise, providing and listening to ongoing feedback, and continuing to learn and grow in an agile environment. Anna is actively engaged in the tech community on various social media platforms, where she regularly speaks at conferences on topics of tech careers, team building, and frontend testing. Her life goal is to get more historically excluded individuals into tech, and she has already helped dozens of people find their first tech jobs. Currently, Anna is working as the Director of Product and Engineering at Axel Springer National Media & Tech GmbH & Co. KG. In this role, she actively works inside the projects and with the engineers to find the coolest, most impactful work they're doing, and then tells the world about it. She also works to forge forward with DEI initiatives for technical staff while advocating for historically excluded groups at the highest level. Before joining Axel Springer, Anna worked at Novatec Consulting GmbH as a Software Engineer, where she did full-stack development on a reporting platform in the FinTech industry. She also worked as a Public Speaker, where she spoke at various conferences, podcasts, and meetups. Anna has a Bachelor of Arts in Media and Communications from the University of Sydney, a Masters in Music (Opera Performance) from the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, and completed a Weiterbildung zur Web- und Softwareentwicklerin from DCI Digital Career Institute ggmbh and a Web Development course from The Odin Project. Her tech stack includes Software Engineering, test, Frontend, Typescript, Spring Boot, Spring, Backend, Java, Amazon Athena, Javascript, and ReactJS.