Carla Kirk-Cohen is Executive Director of Chaincode Labs and a software engineer working on the implementation and improvement of the Lightning Network specification.
Her own route in is the argument for the programmes she now oversees. She started in Bitcoin development at the 2019 Chaincode Residency, the in-person programme Chaincode says launched the careers of many of the engineers now working on Bitcoin open source software, and she has described paying that forward as the thing she has been committed to since.
Before Chaincode she worked at Lightning Labs, focused on reliability improvements to LND and leading the submarine swap team. Chaincode now runs programming challenges for aspiring protocol developers, a provable cryptography workshop, self-paced protocol seminars and a book on Bitcoin development philosophy, and stewards the original BitDevs meetup in New York, all of which sit under her remit alongside the company's engineering and research work.