Lauren Hayward Schaefer is a developer advocate for MongoDB. She began her career as a software engineer for IBM. She held a variety of roles there including full-stack developer, test automation specialist, social media lead, and growth hacking engineer. She went on to be a developer advocate at SugarCRM. She is an international speaker who is skilled in taking hard-to-understand topics and making them seem simple. Lauren holds a BS and MS in Computer Science from North Carolina State University and is the co-inventor of ten issued United States patents.