Tammy Butow
Co-founder & Chaos Engineer
Specialty Areas
Advocacy, Equity and Equality in STEMM, Mentoring, Motivational Speaking, Science, Technology and Innovation, Women in STEMM
About Me
Tammy Butow is an engineering leader and one of the five founding members of global movement Girl Geek Academy, with a mission to teach 1 million women technical skills by 2025. With a raft of computer degrees, Tammy is the organisation’s overqualified CTO.
Backed by the Australian government, Girl Geek Academy is behind Australia’s first all-women hackathon, #SheHacks, Australia’s first all-women makerfest, #SheMakes, the sell-out gamefest, #SheMakesGames, and the world’s first hackathon for girls aged five to eight, #MissMakesCode.
Tammy started her career at the young age of 10, making money from building and fixing computers and ridding her family friends’ computers of viruses.
Post-graduation, she became a software engineer and engineering manager with the National Australia Bank (NAB) in Melbourne, Tammy later moved to New York where she honed her management skills as DigitalOcean’s Platform Manager – Cloud Infrastructure as a Service.
In October 2015, Tammy was snapped up by Dropbox to be Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) Manager, leading the hybrid software/systems group in its Silicon Valley HQ, before taking up the position of Principal Site Reliability Engineer at Gremlin in December 2017. An Aussie-In-The-Valley, Tammy sits as Girl Geek Academy’s on-the-ground connection as the organisation prepares to unleash its initiatives in the U.S market in 2018.
Tammy began her tech journey with a Bachelor of Computer Science & Bachelor of Education degree from QUT (Queensland University of Technology), where she also worked in the university’s datacenter doing systems engineering work. This over-achiever made the Dean’s List and got First Class Honors, leading to a Masters of Computer Science at RMIT University.
Keeping with the social impact theme, Tammy joined the Greenpeace Tech Advisory Board in March 2018.
Tammy is fast establishing herself as an in-demand speaker, inspiring more women to speak at conferences so the ratio is more representative and – ultimately – equal.
