About me
I'm Masha — a staff engineer, perpetual student, and someone who believes the best technology feels invisible.
By Day
Staff engineer at Google DeepMind. Building AI Studio — the place where developers meet Gemini. Previously: three database teams at Google Cloud.
hover to flip ↻By Night
(and weekends, and mornings)
Pursuing an MS in Cybersecurity at NYU. Current obsession: applied cryptography. Math that keeps secrets.
The non-linear journey
In Russia, I started with literature and history. Then psychology and neuroscience — I spent years in Alzheimer's research labs during college because I wanted to be a neuroscientist.
But I was coding on the side, building apps, falling in love with making things. Made it a double major. Ran the computer science society, organized hackathons, chaired ACM-W.
First internship at ActionIQ turned into 3+ years of startup life — shipping fast, wearing many hats, handling trillions of rows of data.
At Google DeepMind now, building AI Studio — the developer experience for Gemini. Before this, four years leading database teams at Google Cloud (Spanner, Bigtable, Firestore). The path from neuroscience to databases to AI wasn't planned, but it makes a strange kind of sense: every step was about making complex systems legible to humans.
When I'm not working
Running
Moving through NYC on foot. Best thinking happens mid-stride.
Poetry
I write it, rarely share it. The act is the point.
Guitar
Learning slowly. Miss piano. NYC apartments are small.
Sustainability
How do we build a future that actually works?
things I believe
Hot takes
"There's no layer where abstraction 'doesn't apply.' There's only being intentional about when you do and don't."
"Building for reuse often takes the same effort as hardcoding—but refactoring later takes forever."
"The fastest teams are the ones that trust each other enough to be wrong."
"Doing just what's assigned to you is always a fail. Do what it takes."
"Some decisions need to be right. Some don't. I don't have enough ego to fight for the ones that don't matter."