Start
Type of event
In person
Place/room
D-Space, HPI Campus 1, Prof.-Dr.-Helmert-Straße 2-3, 14482 Potsdam
Price
free
We are excited to kick off the new year with the first "HPI meets… Alumna Katya Sumina/Google" on January 22, 2026. Our guest speaker, Katya Sumina, Senior Software Engineer at Google, will present "When Customers Love Your Product: Engineering for Heavy Traffic" and share insights from her career journey after graduation.
Abstract of the talk
It is Black Friday. You prepared amazing discounts, customers are storming your web-shop and revenue is within reach - until suddenly, your web-shop goes down. What happened? And how could you have prevented this? In this tech talk, we will discuss how engineers build distributed systems to sustain high traffic, stay healthy and serve customers well. I will share practical tips and tricks that every software engineer should know in order to build robust and scalable systems.
About Katya Sumina, Senior Software Engineer, Google
Katya Sumina graduated from the IT Systems Engineering Bachelor’s program at the Hasso Plattner Institute in 2021. She is now a Senior Software Engineer at Google, based in the Zurich office. Katya works in the area of AI agent security. Previously, she spent several years building high-load, scalable, globally distributed systems for Google Cloud. Before becoming a software engineer in her late twenties, Katya pursued a career in journalism and project management. Katya also holds an M.A. in Gender Studies.
The event will conclude with a get-together with all participants in the D-Space.
This event will be held in English.
Registration for students
Registration for alumni