Dr. Mariya Breyter has spent more than 20 years doing the thing most companies say they want and few actually do: turning technology and AI ambitions into operating models that work. She currently leads Technical Program Management at Atlassian, focused on AI-enabled transformation, after leadership roles at Amazon, AWS, Goldman Sachs, and UnitedHealth Group — four very different cultures that taught her the same lesson four different ways: the technology is not the hard part. 

She has taught graduate students at NYU for seven years, covering technical and Agile project management, risk management, and organizational transformation, and is the author of Agile Product and Project Management (Apress) and co-author of Reliability Engineering in the Cloud (Pearson). She has spoken at more than 100 conferences and industry events, holds a Ph.D. in Computational Linguistics, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University. 

A lifelong builder, Mariya still writes code and ships AI applications herself—she'd rather prototype the thing than just present slides about it. She's excited to bring that same quality to Brown: helping students connect project management theory to what actually happens when you're the one leading a technical initiative and preparing them to lead in a rapidly changing technology landscape. 

She also practices what she teaches at home: she and her husband, Greg, like to say they raised their two sons using Agile methodology — with reasonably successful outcomes. One is now an aerospace engineer at SpaceX; the other is currently at the University of Cambridge writing a dissertation in data science. So far, the family's Agile retrospective has been positive.