Catherine Singer

Venture Advisor

Catherine Singer is a thought leader with decades of experience leading organizations in data engineering and enterprise-scale platform system development. She served most recently as Senior Vice President of Engineering for Data and Site Leader for Yahoo in Champaign, home to over 200 software developers, architects and data scientists, located on the campus of the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. She also led teams on both coasts and overseas as part of her company-wide, big data organization.

Catherine received her B.S. from MIT and M.S. from Columbia University, both in electrical engineering. She began her engineering career at IBM, where she received her first patent, which was used in IBM optical storage products. A Senior Principal Engineer at Lockheed-Martin, she served as technical lead on several large defense eletro-optics and signal processing programs. Catherine moved into engineering management at Lockheed-Martin as System Engineering Section Manager for Algorithms and Signal Processing.

Moving to Champaign, she was responsible for the Bluetooth stack in all Motorola devices when it was an emerging mobile technology. She played a leadership role in transitioning the Champaign team from Motorola to Yahoo, creating the Champaign site 15 years ago. Experienced in leading through change, Catherine’s team expanded their role to not only be the center of big data for Yahoo, but to also leverage their Yahoo expertise to take on Verizon big data systems and data science opportunities as well upon acquisition by Verizon. On subsequent acquisition by Apollo, she led the organization as it pivoted from largely on-premises co-located private cloud systems to a hybrid public-cloud / private colo strategy.