- Joined
- May 2024
- How they joined
- Directly
- Before Cognition
- Grafana LabsSenior Field Engineer - OpenTelemetry, Distributed Tracing & Continuous Profiling
- Now
- Golden Geese Recruiting
“Of course, starting something new also means closing a chapter that's meant an incredible amount to me. My confidence in Cognition's future has never been higher.”
- In October 2026 she left Cognition to co-found Golden Geese Recruiting with Paxton Duff (CEO) as Co-Founder & Managing Partner; the firm places Forward Deployed Engineers at AI companies and advises pre-seed to Series C startups on structuring customer engineering teams.Oct 7, 2026I'm excited to share that I'm joining Paxton Duff at Golden Geese Recruiting as Co-Founder and Managing Partner. We're building a recruiting firm focused on two things: 1. Connecting Forward Deployed Engineers with leading AI companies. 2. Advising pre-seed to Series C startups on how to structure their customer engineering teams. From AWS to Grafana to Windsurf to Cognition, I've been fortunate to wear a lot of different hats: SWE, Solution Architect, Solution Engineer, Deployed Engineer, DE leader, and Strategic AE. Each role taught me something different, but one lesson has stayed with me throughout: the people you build with make all the difference. I've seen firsthand how the right people can change the trajectory of a company, and someone's career. Golden Geese is my chance to help make those connections. Of course, starting something new also means closing a chapter that's meant an incredible amount to me. My confidence in Cognition's future has never been higher. I'm incredibly grateful for the people, the experiences, and the opportunity to build alongside such an exceptional team. To Dave Frankel, Meredith (McCarty) Siewert, Sandeep Shah, Jeff Wang, Russell Kaplan, Scott Wu, Isaac Kim, Graham Moreno, Varun Mohan, Anshul Ramachandran, Alex Laubscher, Jacob Addington, Ben Jaderstrom, Henry G., Calvin Giroud, Arjun Mishra, Shawn Azman, Satwik Bebortha, Nicole Rettinger, Dani McCabe, and so many more, thank you. CTA: If you're an FDE, DE, SE, SWE, or technical graduate looking to join a leading AI company, or a leader building an FDE team, we'd love to connect.
- Co-founder Paxton Duff wrote that as a DE leader she 'interviewed more than 1,000 candidates', a hiring track record that directly underpins her move into FDE recruiting.Oct 7, 2026
- Her departure post on working at Cognition, verbatim: "Of course, starting something new also means closing a chapter that's meant an incredible amount to me. My confidence in Cognition's future has never been higher. I'm incredibly grateful for the people, the experiences, and the opportunity to build alongside such an exceptional team."Oct 7, 2026I'm excited to share that I'm joining Paxton Duff at Golden Geese Recruiting as Co-Founder and Managing Partner. We're building a recruiting firm focused on two things: 1. Connecting Forward Deployed Engineers with leading AI companies. 2. Advising pre-seed to Series C startups on how to structure their customer engineering teams. From AWS to Grafana to Windsurf to Cognition, I've been fortunate to wear a lot of different hats: SWE, Solution Architect, Solution Engineer, Deployed Engineer, DE leader, and Strategic AE. Each role taught me something different, but one lesson has stayed with me throughout: the people you build with make all the difference. I've seen firsthand how the right people can change the trajectory of a company, and someone's career. Golden Geese is my chance to help make those connections. Of course, starting something new also means closing a chapter that's meant an incredible amount to me. My confidence in Cognition's future has never been higher. I'm incredibly grateful for the people, the experiences, and the opportunity to build alongside such an exceptional team. To Dave Frankel, Meredith (McCarty) Siewert, Sandeep Shah, Jeff Wang, Russell Kaplan, Scott Wu, Isaac Kim, Graham Moreno, Varun Mohan, Anshul Ramachandran, Alex Laubscher, Jacob Addington, Ben Jaderstrom, Henry G., Calvin Giroud, Arjun Mishra, Shawn Azman, Satwik Bebortha, Nicole Rettinger, Dani McCabe, and so many more, thank you. CTA: If you're an FDE, DE, SE, SWE, or technical graduate looking to join a leading AI company, or a leader building an FDE team, we'd love to connect.
- Moved from engineering to sales as Strategic Account Executive at Cognition (Aug 2025-Feb 2026; per The Org, the Insurance vertical); profile states she closed $2.2M+ in ARR and handed off a $1.7M upsell that closed the same quarter plus two accounts in active evaluation.Aug 2025
- As Deployed Engineer Leader, East and EMEA (Nov 2024-Aug 2025), she partnered with a fellow DE manager to scale the Deployed Engineering team from 2 to 30 and made Presidents Club FY25.Nov 2024
- Joined Windsurf (then Codeium, later acquired by Cognition) in May 2024 as its 2nd Deployed Engineer and the company's first technical hire outside the Bay Area, working from Austin; she rode the acquisition into Cognition.May 2024
- She summarizes her path verbatim as: "From AWS to Grafana to Windsurf to Cognition, I've been fortunate to wear a lot of different hats: SWE, Solution Architect, Solution Engineer, Deployed Engineer, DE leader, and Strategic AE."Oct 7, 2026I'm excited to share that I'm joining Paxton Duff at Golden Geese Recruiting as Co-Founder and Managing Partner. We're building a recruiting firm focused on two things: 1. Connecting Forward Deployed Engineers with leading AI companies. 2. Advising pre-seed to Series C startups on how to structure their customer engineering teams. From AWS to Grafana to Windsurf to Cognition, I've been fortunate to wear a lot of different hats: SWE, Solution Architect, Solution Engineer, Deployed Engineer, DE leader, and Strategic AE. Each role taught me something different, but one lesson has stayed with me throughout: the people you build with make all the difference. I've seen firsthand how the right people can change the trajectory of a company, and someone's career. Golden Geese is my chance to help make those connections. Of course, starting something new also means closing a chapter that's meant an incredible amount to me. My confidence in Cognition's future has never been higher. I'm incredibly grateful for the people, the experiences, and the opportunity to build alongside such an exceptional team. To Dave Frankel, Meredith (McCarty) Siewert, Sandeep Shah, Jeff Wang, Russell Kaplan, Scott Wu, Isaac Kim, Graham Moreno, Varun Mohan, Anshul Ramachandran, Alex Laubscher, Jacob Addington, Ben Jaderstrom, Henry G., Calvin Giroud, Arjun Mishra, Shawn Azman, Satwik Bebortha, Nicole Rettinger, Dani McCabe, and so many more, thank you. CTA: If you're an FDE, DE, SE, SWE, or technical graduate looking to join a leading AI company, or a leader building an FDE team, we'd love to connect.
- From Feb to Oct 2026 she held a Special Projects role at Cognition 'reporting to the President and working on initiatives across product, operations, enablement, marketing, and sales'; Paxton Duff describes it as spearheading special projects for Cognition's president.Feb 2026
- Two months after joining Windsurf, she created an update-readme-dependencies branch on Exafunction/codeium.el (the Codeium Emacs plugin) on 2024-07-16, adding a libxml2 dependency note, her open source footprint on the acquired company's product.Jul 16, 2024
- Promoted at Grafana Labs to Senior Field Engineer focused on OpenTelemetry, distributed tracing and continuous profiling (2023-2024), building demos, workshops and technical content for the SE organization.Feb 2023
- At Grafana Labs she was a Solutions Engineer (Feb 2022-Feb 2023) and made Presidents Club FY23, Central SE of the year and Global rookie of the year, ranking #6 of 55+ SEs globally for new logos; she was also the second LATAM Solutions Engineer at the company.Feb 2022
- Public headline says "FDE Recruiting & Advising | ex-Cognition AI, Grafana Labs, AWS | former FDE & FDE leader".
We recruit FDEs (forward-deployed engineers) for elite AI companies and advise early-stage startups as they build their customer engineering orgs. We provide a white-glove, hands-on approach for our clients and FDE candidates, rooted in our background as operators at Cognition, Windsurf, Grafana, MongoDB, AWS, etc. If you are a potential candidate or partner company, contact us via DM or on our website below.
Reporting to the President and working on initiatives across product, operations, enablement, marketing, and sales.
Closed $2.2M+ in ARR through customer expansion and acquisition During my transition back to the technical side, I handed off a $1.7M upsell that closed that the same quarter as well as another 2 accounts in active evaluations with executive alignment.
2nd Deployed Engineer (DE) at the company; first technical hire outside the Bay Area Partnered with fellow DE Manager to scale the DE team from 2 to 30 Presidents Club FY25
Presidents Club FY24 Customer facing technical subject matter expert for distributed tracing and continuous profiling Accelerate, scale, and enhance the route to technical wins by supporting the field through comprehensive technical meetings, significant strategic POV's, blogs, webinars, and more Design, create, and present technical presentations, whitepapers, product demonstrations, and workshops for Solution Engineers to deliver to prospects, customers, and the community Collaborate across departments, frequently partnering with Product Management, Technical Writers, Marketing, Engineering, and Customer Experience teams to ensure customer feedback is heard and acted upon
Presidents Club FY23 In FY 23, across >55 SEs globally was #6 for new logos signed and #7 for new revenue obtained. For the 10 SEs in the central region was #1 for new revenue. Central SE of the year (by $$ and %), Global rookie of the year Closed the biggest deal of the quarter in the central region as the lead Solutions Engineer (Q2 + Q4). Created the winning demo amongst all solutions engineers globally on how to best position a recently acquired software, this led to the entire solutions engineer organization being better equipped to present and articulate the value of the product. Designed various workflows/architectures to enable the extraction and analysis of data both in person sessions and virtually resulting in greater adoption of our products. Lead multiple successful proofs of values resulting in technical wins. Presented on stage at multiple Grafana speaking engagements to over 70 people at a time, as well as prepared the technical content and demo that was to be used globally. Second LATAM Solutions Engineer in the company, working to enable and bring a stronger presence in the region both in terms of partner relationships and customer base.
Created proof of concept demonstrating a cloud native architecture approach for data processing and ingestion, resulting in a significant reduction ongoing maintenance and cost for the customer Aided in the development of a reusable template (infrastructure as code) for an existing solution, helping with the initial design, scripting, testing, and locking down of identity and access, resulting in the elimination the 20-40 minutes setup time, turning it into a one click deployment Cleared customer blockers by diving deep into various domains such as machine learning, compute, analytics, call centers, end user compute, and media services resulting in the multiple external AWS documents being updated as well as the continuation of their development on the AWS platform Led over a dozen technical training and hands on lab sessions to deepen customer’s technical understanding and foster creativity in domains such as security, call- centers, containers, machine learning, databases, networking, and compute Developed internal training document around backups in AWS to help eliminate redundant questions from incoming team members and ensure they were properly ramped up before taking calls
Double Major: Economics and Computer Science
I'm excited to share that I'm joining Paxton Duff at Golden Geese Recruiting as Co-Founder and Managing Partner. We're building a recruiting firm focused on two things: 1. Connecting Forward Deployed Engineers with leading AI companies. 2. Advising pre-seed to Series C startups on how to structure their customer engineering teams. From AWS to Grafana to Windsurf to Cognition, I've been fortunate to wear a lot of different hats: SWE, Solution Architect, Solution Engineer, Deployed Engineer, DE leader, and Strategic AE. Each role taught me something different, but one lesson has stayed with me throughout: the people you build with make all the difference. I've seen firsthand how the right people can change the trajectory of a company, and someone's career. Golden Geese is my chance to help make those connections. Of course, starting something new also means closing a chapter that's meant an incredible amount to me. My confidence in Cognition's future has never been higher. I'm incredibly grateful for the people, the experiences, and the opportunity to build alongside such an exceptional team. To Dave Frankel, Meredith (McCarty) Siewert, Sandeep Shah, Jeff Wang, Russell Kaplan, Scott Wu, Isaac Kim, Graham Moreno, Varun Mohan, Anshul Ramachandran, Alex Laubscher, Jacob Addington, Ben Jaderstrom, Henry G., Calvin Giroud, Arjun Mishra, Shawn Azman, Satwik Bebortha, Nicole Rettinger, Dani McCabe, and so many more, thank you. CTA: If you're an FDE, DE, SE, SWE, or technical graduate looking to join a leading AI company, or a leader building an FDE team, we'd love to connect.
