About

Karen Milfeld is a Senior Mobile Software Development Engineer at Zillow, with over 11 years of relevant experience in software engineering and research. She has been a key contributor to three major Android apps, including Real Estate & Rentals, Rentals, and Android Wear app. Her contributions include features in nearly every functional area, refactoring, bug fixes, memory analysis, maintenance, and releases to the Google Play and Amazon App stores. Karen's example feature contributions include displaying school data, commute support, Spanish support, custom fonts, and the 12th man easter egg. She has designed and implemented a major architectural refactor to bring the app in line with object-oriented design principles. She has also eliminated several impactful memory leaks present in the app, drastically reducing crashes and negative reviews. Prior to joining Zillow, Karen worked as a Software Engineer II at Blackbaud, where she participated in scrum development with two different groups: Altru, Blackbaud’s ticketing solution; and app engines, the core library spanning most Blackbaud offerings. She worked on many different functional areas, including sales, memberships, and credit card processing. Karen was a subject matter expert for refunds and designed, implemented, maintained, and developed extended features for refund functionality. Karen started her career as a Pre-Professional Programmer at IBM, where she participated in weekly SPEC.org committee meetings for the SPECsip performance workload. She collaborated with the Linux Performance Team and IBM Research to set up and tune SPECsip on IBM Intel Blades. Karen holds a Master of Science (M.S.) in Computer Science from the University of Washington, and a Bachelor of Science (BS) in Computer Science from The University of Texas at Austin. She also attended The International Center. Karen's tech stack includes Software Engineering, Mobile, Android, SQL, dotNET, Javascript, and Research Scientist.