Erika Rice Scherpelz, is a distinguished technology leader and solution synthesizer currently serving as the Head of Engineering for Search & Foundations at Sourcegraph. Sourcegraph is a technology company, and Erika has been contributing her expertise to the organization for a year as of the present. She operates in a remote capacity from Bellevue, Washington, where she has been leading a team of approximately 40 technical employees, predominantly software engineers.
EDUCATION
Erika’s educational background includes a Master’s in Computer Science from the University of Washington, where she graduated in 2006, and a Bachelor’s in Computer Science and Mathematics from Harvey Mudd College, completed in 2004 with honors in both Computer Science and Humanities and Social Sciences.
CAREER
In her role as Head of Engineering, Search & Foundations, Erika oversees various crucial aspects, including Sourcegraph’s Enterprise Code Search product, Product Platform teams, Infrastructure teams, and Security team. Prior to this, she held the position of Head of Graph at Sourcegraph, managing the Search and Code Intelligence teams.
Before her tenure at Sourcegraph, Erika gained valuable experience as the Director of Data Platform Engineering at Flexport, a role she held for eight months in Bellevue, Washington. During her time at Flexport, she successfully built and led a team of 14 Software and Analytics Engineers. Erika played a pivotal role in influencing the data strategy for data science, analytics, and transactional use cases. She collaborated with product managers and engineering directors to define a cross-team data roadmap and vision for a shared data platform.
Erika has a remarkable career at Google, spanning over 16 years. In her most recent position there, she served as a Senior Software Engineering Manager & Staff Software Engineer for Google Maps. Over five years and six months, Erika managed a team of managers and provided technical leadership for platform project goals. She contributed to product management strategy, overseeing the development of globally scalable and distributed on-map data representations, place saving, and location sharing.
Earlier in her Google career, Erika held the role of Technology Lead Manager & Software Engineer for Google+ Social Graph, where she managed critical social graph infrastructure. She led a team of 20 in implementing a data store migration over five years, involving over 10 billion circle members across nearly half a billion accounts.
Erika began her professional journey as a Software Engineer specializing in Data Analysis Tools at Google, where she honed her skills in logs analysis, web graph queries, and A/B website experiments. She was recognized for architecting solutions to ambiguous problems and played a key role in designing and developing client libraries for a precursor to BigQuery.
Throughout her career, Erika has demonstrated expertise in various skills, including Big Data, Large Scale Systems, Problem Solving, Interpersonal Skills, Scalability, Cultural Diversity, Operational Excellence, Mentoring, Technical Vision, Analytics, Setting Strategic Direction, Software Engineering, Systems Thinking, Coaching, Data Quality, Data Architecture, Strategy, Recruiting, Software Architectural Design, Cross-team Collaboration, Process Improvement, and Data Engineering.
